A team of Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) investigators has shown that a method they developed to improve the usefulness and precision of the most common form of the gene-editing tools CRISPR-Cas9 RNA-guided nucleases can be applied to Cas9 enzymes from other bacterial sources. In a paper receiving advance online publication in Nature Biotechnology, the team reports evolving a variant of SaCas9 – the Cas9 enzyme from the Streptococcus aureus bacteria – that recognizes a broader range of nucleotide sequences, allowing targeting of genomic sites previously inaccessible to CRISPR-Cas9 technology.
Original post:
Team broadens utility of more compact CRISPR-Cas9 by increasing its targeting range
