The type I CRISPR protein Cas3 works like Pac-Man, chomping away at a continuous stream of nucleotides with intrinsic activity for introducing targeted large deletions from a few hundred base pairs to as large as 200 kb. However, without the molecular equivalent to the four colored ghosts who chase and capture Pac-Man, the broad and unidirectional genome editing activity of Cas3 is essentially unregulated.
Yan Zhang, PhD, assistant professor in the department of biological chemistry at the University of Michigan Medical School, and her collaborators at Cornell University identified two anti-CRISPR proteins that can “turn off” Cas3, paving the way toward safer and better-controlled CRISPR applications.
The research article, “Exploiting activation and inactivation mechanisms in type I-C CRISPR-Cas3 for genome-editing applications,” was published in Molecular Cell.
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