Its makes many more organisms tractable, more accurately.
Previously, transgenics was tough mostly because of the difficulty in inserting sequence in the right place doing the right thing. It would take decades to develop the specific organism-specific tools to really change DNA.
it's gene editing in an already living organism.
True. The thing about older transgenics, is that it was like using a shotgun to build a birdhouse. It was messy and you broke a lot of things to get the one gene where you wanted it. So you had to do a lot of transformations to get it right, and afterwords there was a lot of genetic cleaning up to do.
With CRISPR you can be extremely specific with your targeting, which means you can do things like "gene therapy", which is "patching" DNA in a live organism.
Comments
Its makes many more organisms tractable, more accurately.
Previously, transgenics was tough mostly because of the difficulty in inserting sequence in the right place doing the right thing. It would take decades to develop the specific organism-specific tools to really change DNA.
True. The thing about older transgenics, is that it was like using a shotgun to build a birdhouse. It was messy and you broke a lot of things to get the one gene where you wanted it. So you had to do a lot of transformations to get it right, and afterwords there was a lot of genetic cleaning up to do.
With CRISPR you can be extremely specific with your targeting, which means you can do things like "gene therapy", which is "patching" DNA in a live organism.