
Crystal structure of S. aureus Cas9 in complex with crRNA and its target DNA
In past posts, you asked tell in more detail about CRISPR / Cas9 and approaches to genome editing. I just did not include such a voluminous material in the last post. And in this I will not include, for example, the TALEN method, which can potentially be more accurate and has its advantages. But darling, yes.
Let's try to walk through the already well-described method of genetic modification using CRISPR-Cas9 and look a little more broadly at the prospects that it opens up for us. I was wildly interested in the direction of xenogeneic transplantation from pigs to humans. The first, "pre-correction" methods showed that such a pig transplant is killed by the body within a few minutes ... But the method was not discarded at all. Still, this is a promising way not to wait until the next potential organ donor dies, but to grow them in advance. Then it turned out that pigs also carry a pack of specific retroviruses that are built into their genome and can cause an epidemic of a new xenozoonosis. And viruses, too, must somehow be picked out before transplantation. And somewhere here people in white coats appear on the stage, doing something incomprehensible in their laboratories ...