Swiss researchers have unveiled a genetic programming system that could revolutionise CRISPR-Cas gene editing.
The technique has so far been shown to modify 25 target sites within genes in a cell in one go, the researchers have reported.
It could readily be scaled up to modify as many as hundreds of genes, according to its developers, paving the way for "complex, large-scale" cell programming.
The technique involves the creation of a genetic program through a plasmid – a circular DNA molecule – storing the Cas enzyme "blueprint" together with RNA address molecules, arranged in sequence.
The enzyme that is used is the Cas12a enzyme rather than the Cas9 enzyme.
CRISPR techniques are already in use in medicine as treatments for haematological cancers.
The scientists say they have successfully conducted experiments to insert the plasmid into human cells, achieving the modification and regulation of several genes simultaneously.
This shows "constitutive, conditional, inducible, orthogonal and multiplexed genome engineering," they report.
Researcher Professor Randall Platt, of ETH Zurich, Basel, said: "Thanks to this new tool, we and other scientists can now achieve what we could only dream of doing in the past."
Campa CC, Weisbach NR, Santinha AJ, Incarnato D, Platt RJ: Multiplexed genome engineering by Cas12a and CRISPR arrays encoded on single transcripts. Nature Methods 12 August 2019; doi: 10.1038/s41592-019-0508-6
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