Do you know what is a CRISPR? No! It is not the Romanian word for the British word for, well chips!
By the way, In British English, ‘crisps’ refers to what North Americans call potato chips—thin, fried slices of potato, while ‘chips’ in the UK means French fries!
But CRISPR is not what you can eat but it is a scientific treat!
In a book called eugenics we see how the CRISPR-cas9 technique is making human gene editing seem more socially acceptable. This is a way to tackle the telomerase issue which is directly linked to ageing!
Jennifer Doudna and Emmanuelle Charpentier have been awarded the ultimate science prize for their breakthrough research on CRISPR technology! Their work and as well as the vital contributions of other scientists has paved the way for the emergence of CRISPR as the most powerful gene-editing tool!
The full form is a handful though! Clustered regularly interspaced palindromic repeats or (CRISPR)/Cas9! As mentioned before it is a gene-editing technology causing a major upheaval in biomedical research. It makes it possible to correct errors in the genome and turn on or off genes in cells and organisms quickly, cheaply and with relative ease.
Apparently the CRISPR/Cas9 system evolved naturally in bacteria and archaea as a defense mechanism against phage infection and plasmid transfer.
Now things get a little technical!
So Bacteria or archaea acquire a segment of their DNA sequence to insert into the CRISPR spacer region when first infiltrated by an exogenous phage or plasmid. If reinfected with homologous DNA, the bacterium will initiate transcription of the CRISPR region.
After a series of processing and maturation processes to generate a single guide RNA (sgRNA), the sgRNA guides Cas9 to shear the DNA strand that disrupts the homologous spacer region.
The recognition process of the sgRNA requires the involvement of protospacer-adjacent motifs (PAMs), a short guanine-enriched sequence.9
The preferred PAM by Streptococcus pyogenes Cas9 (SpCas9) is NGG, which is common in the genomes of most organisms, thereby facilitating the use of CRISPR technology across the fields of plant and animal science, together with biomedicine. This is where the CRISPR technology comes in!
By changing the nucleotide sequence of a small segment of guide RNA, CRISPR/Cas9 allows the accurate targeting of almost any desired genomic locus for the purpose of correcting disease-causing mutations or silencing genes associated with disease onset!
WIth proper research and more time the promising applications for this technology include the treatment of cancers, cardiovascular diseases, sickle cell anemia, and neurodegenerative disease!
In the future when there is a troubled Genetic disorder do not be alarmed if the doctor says, “Do not fret! We have the CRISPR!”
Then again do not pretend to know what it is anyway! Since it is not as easy as it seems! Then again it may not have been easy to make the first indian movie Raja Harishchandra truth be told! Which is why the biggest award in the cinema is named after him! Shri Dadasaheb Phalke!
Now do not eat any crisp of the potato kind in the night if you want to have a good sleep!
SHubh Ratri!
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