To Speed CRISPR/Cas9’s Search and Snip, Try Extra Cas9 and gRNA

The CRISPR/Cas9 gene-editing system is advantaged by its targeting mechanism’s inherent flexibility, but disadvantaged by this mechanism’s inherent slowness. The mechanism, which depends on a guide RNA (gRNA)-programmable protein, can take a long time to comb through a genome before it finally chances upon a target DNA sequence—up to six hours in a bacterial cell. The problem, say scientists based at Uppsala University, is slow kinetics. One way to overcome this problem, the sc