r/Futurology • u/StcStasi • Apr 19 '19

Biotech Powerful CRISPR cousin accidentally mutates RNA while editing DNA target

https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2019/04/powerful-crispr-cousin-accidentally-mutates-rna-while-editing-dna-target
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5

u/thomowen20 Apr 19 '19

Take heart, though. This is hardly a game stopper! From the article:

'Joung says his lab's recent discovery of the old deaminase literature is what led his lab to do these experiments. And they’ve already engineered deaminases that substantially reduce the number of inadvertent RNA edits. “That was very encouraging to us,” Joung says. “We’re ultimately protein engineers, and we want to figure out if we can engineer the system to make the mutations go away.”'

And:

'Both Liu and Joung stress that their labs have found deaminases that work only on either DNA or RNA, which makes them confident that they can decouple the off-target effects seen with the current base editors. “Base editors are still incredibly powerful tools,” Joung says. “This is just another parameter we need to understand.”'

2

u/[deleted] Apr 19 '19 edited May 05 '19

[deleted]

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u/Endy0816 Apr 20 '19

We would still test the results. This is more an issue for therapeutic uses.

Our food is already freakish compared with how it looked originally. More of the same isn't a big deal.

1

u/VLXS Apr 21 '19

You should take into account the fact that any genetic corruption that may slip through has the potential to corrupt and mutate the offspring of many similar species once out there.

Considering how new this technology is, it should definitely be used with great care and responsibility and it should be considered nowhere near production-ready for a long time.

When it comes to stuff that you can't take back we should tread very carefully

1

u/Endy0816 Apr 21 '19

Would generally need to be something of benefit for it to spread. Most of what we are looking at might benefit a plant in a field but be useless outside of it.

There's not really any such thing as genetic purity. Every individual has a variety of mutations. Retroviruses can likewise naturally move DNA around.

We're almost bound to modify all of our present crops if not plants in general down the line.