Turbo-charged Crispr gene-editor can make 25 alterations in one go
Theoretically thousands of changes could be made at once using new technique
An enhanced Crispr gene-editing technique has been developed that can introduce as many as 25 different regulatory changes or alteration to a gene simultaneously. This new approach to encoding Crispr components has both advantages and disadvantages when compared with more traditional techniques. One of the most important distinctions is that when Cas proteins and gRNAs are introduced separately, they are expressed by different promoters. Contrastingly, when they are both part of the same plasmid, both components are expressed by a single promoter and therefore have a fixed ratio to one another. This enables much tighter control of expression, but may also result in a fixed ratio that isn’t optimised for the situation in question, resulting in poorer activity.