As described recently in Nature Communications, Michigan Medicine researchers have developed a new variant of the much-touted tool CRISPR-Cas9, which improves both safety and effectiveness when editing DNA.

Today, safety and efficacy continue to hold CRISPR-Cas9 gene targeting back from its full clinical potential.

The new CRISPR-Cas9 variant improves efficiency when inserting a gene or DNA fragment to a precise location in the genome, known as “knocking in.”  It also reduces the rate of unintended insertions or deletions of base pairs, known as “indels,” that often happen while gene editing.

The new variant is called “meticulous integration Cas9,” or miCas9, to reflect its extraordinary capacity to enable maximum integration and create minimal indels.

The team previously reported discoveries about Cas9 genome editing techniques in 2014 and they reported beneficial effects of a RAD51 agonist, called RS-1, in gene editing in 2016.

Nature Communications, November 2020, “MiCas9 Increases Large Size Gene Knock-in Rates and Reduces Undesirable On-target and Off-target Indel Edits,” by Linyuan Ma, et al.  © 2020 Springer Nature Limited.  All rights reserved.

MiCas9 increases large size gene knock-in rates and reduces undesirable on-target and off-target indel edits chr(124)_pipe Nature Communications