1 Septillion Reasons Dad’s CRISPR-Cas9 May Already Be Toast

by Jim Lane (Biofuels Digest) ... CRISPR-Cas9 is a technique for making a cut at a desired point in a cell’s genome. You can pick the spot and do an edit. Amazing stuff. You can clip out junk genes, or add in useful ones. The promise is pretty obvious to anyone who has ever pruned a tree — you want Nature to direct all its energy to producing the target product you have in mind — whether it is peaches, fuel, or a therapeutic target.

Pruning directs that energy towards fruiting and away from branching. In that case, we’re editing the tree. But we can edit at the gene level, and that’s what breeding animals or plants is about.

That’s how we have boosted yields around the world. That’s why we have enough to eat, and fuel and fiber and everything else we get from biomass.

That’s where CRISPR-Cas comes in. You edit with complete precision. Snip, snip, you’re done. It’s a hyper-specific, gene level version of what any gardener does with a pair of pruning shears, yet takes the system of improving genomes, using the set of DNA that Nature gives us to work with, to another level.

... that stream of bioethical chat about whether something that is not transgenic is still GMO and thereby to be controlled, feared and shamed, we’re seeing that for sure.

The broad field of study is called (by some) microbe engineering, and in recent years we have seen a host of companies break out with different capabilities in that space. There are the big commercial biofoundries that are building up heft, like Zymergen and Ginkgo BioWorks — and companies in the orbit include Arzeda, Genomatica, Codexis, Twist Biosciences, and Amyris. For sure, Zymergen and Ginkgo will tell you that they can achieve very precise targets in performance whether a novel strain (Ginkgo) or in strain improvement (ZYmergen). They just get precision at very high speed.

In the CRISPR-Cas space, Caribou Biosciences is the spin-out that is in everyone’s spotlight. They’ve turned CRISPR-Cas into a licensable platform — and have been racking the licenses up at almost a one a week rate.

They’re working hard in Berkeley and Boston on yield. The race is on. But don’t count out Boulder — they may have the horse to win. With Muse bio’s ForgeCraft generating “low-cost libraries of thousands of designer protein, pathway, or genome variants each with specifically defined, trackable mutations” — as soon as Muse gets some more development, the first-gen approaches to CRISPR-Cas may well be toast. READ MORE