Stanford researchers develop an engineered 'mini' CRISPR genome editing system | Hacker News Reader

Stanford researchers develop an engineered 'mini' CRISPR genome editing system

news.stanford.edu

118 pointskungfudoi16 comments

Here is the paper link - https://doi.org/10.1016/j.molcel.2021.08.008

They did a lot of hard work to get there! A few years we synthesized some prokaryotic argonaute proteins for their lab. Bet they were considering them as an alternative to CRISPR proteins. Excited to use CasMINI in some bacterial systems, Cas9/Cpf1 are kinda annoying to synthesize.

And thats why I love HN, some topic with notation I have no idea about but I my ADHD will solve that for sure. Thanks for providing the entrypoint!

An important detail left out from the short article is that CasMINI was evaluated for base editing as well. I personally would hesitate taking something that cuts my DNA unless I really really need to and close to dying, but I might accept the risks of base editing if it gives me significant health benefits.

I am surprised by your comment. We have much better techniques for understanding off-target issues with DSB-inducing gene editors. I'm certain the tox package $NTLA put together to support NTLA-2001 looked into this non-clinically very, very closely.

From my vantage point, $BEAM does not have the analytical tools to actually know where edits are occurring in an entire genome-context. Maybe RCA-type ideas, or super deep NGS, but I haven't seen robust and convincing off-target analysis yet.

I don't have enough biological knowledge to understand the potential off-target effects of current base editing technology at $BEAM, and I accept your opinion that it's not yet ready for production, but in general what I love about base editing is that there are billions of people living as control / experiment groups, so as long as the off-target effects can be understood and minimized (hopefully in a few years), I don't have to worry too much about the main effect too much.

How long will the humanity last, when near anyone will be able to engineer a new virus.

At that point near anyone will also be able to engineer antibodies against it.

Nice. I read about these cool new systems all the time, but have to end up waiting for some reagent company to start producing them after they resolve all the IP stuff. A lot of commercial and academic labs don't have access to the facilities/resources needed to produce the enzymes.

What are small public companies working on this?

As this is a very new publication, it looks like it hasn't been licensed/spun-out to an industry partner yet. If I were a betting person, I'd go with one of the gene editing companies on the west coast. Maybe $CRBU?

My question: is it available for hobbyists?

If you have money usually you can just buy these things.

At the start of COVID, for example, I had access to COVID tests before most of the market (at a huge premium) via work. They really did not care who bought it. At worst create some paper company and start asking questions.

>“At first, this system did not work at all for a year,” Xu >said. “But after iterations of bioengineering, ...

Doesn't sound very "engineering" yet if they had to use try and error for over a year.

I'm sure it was informed trial and error.

Unfortunately, things in biology tend to fail silently and without log entries.

0 to 1 creation is still engineering even if involves testing and measurement closer to the scientific method.

Trial and error are cornerstones of engineering regardless.

To add to this, trial and error is the cornerstone of how we acquire any scientific knowledge.

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