It’s an exciting time to be a
biologist! Every few years it seems like there is another significant technical
breakthrough that allows biological research either to speed up exponentially,
or to enter into areas that were previously inaccessible. In just the last
decade or so we’ve seen the publication and digitisation of the human genome
(without which most current life sciences work would be either impossible or
impractical), the development of super-resolution microscopy (allowing us for the
first time to see live biological processes on a truly molecular scale), the
facilitation of DNA sequencing (making it economical on a large scale), and the
invention or improvement of a whole range of technologies (enzyme-conjugation
systems, flow cytometry, fluorescence-activated cell sorting etc.) that won’t
mean much to anyone outside the field but that have revolutionised the way
research is done. It’s been a long road, but it finally seems like the
ambitions of researchers are starting to be matched by the available
technology, whether it be computational, mechanical, chemical, or biological. The
latest innovation that is taking the biology world by storm is the enormous progress
that has recently been made in an area that has incalculable potential in both
academic and clinical contexts: genome editing. In this post I will try to
explain these recent advancements, why researchers are excited, and why you
should be too!
What is genome editing?
Genome editing is pretty much
what you’d expect from the name; editing the DNA sequence within the genome of
a particular cell. This can involve adding DNA, removing DNA, swapping some DNA
for other DNA, or moving DNA around within the genome. It is difficult to
overstate how powerful a tool genome editing can be when it comes to biological
research. Much of the work done in molecular life sciences is trying to work
out how various molecules fit into the whole machine that is an organism –
genome editing allows researchers to directly tinker with these molecules
(typically proteins, which are of course encoded by a their associated DNA
sequence) and observe the effects. This could involve removing the gene
encoding a given protein from an organism and seeing what defects arise.
Alternatively, you could introduce a specific mutation in a gene to see if that
has functional relevance, or introduce DNA encoding fluorescent marker proteins
into the end of your protein of interest to see where it goes and what it’s up
to. Genome editing elevates researchers from the level of pure observers into
direct manipulators of a system.
