CRISPR

[Anonymous No.11069212]

What's the difference/advantage of CRISPR vs the previous gene splicing that was used to make GMOs?

[Anonymous No.11069229]

>>11069212
it's slightly more convenient compared to other methods

[Anonymous No.11071316]

the technology we were using before was basically incapable of making targeted changes in untouched DNA. we had a couple systems that tried to do targeted editing (zinc finger, TALENs) but they didn't work well, had poor specificity, and were a pain in the ass to design and clone. the best we really could do was make random changes and screen for the specific changes we want. if you randomly inserted DNA you had already modified, you could edit that a few ways (Cre-lox/FLP, etc), but you had to set it up ahead of time in your lines.

CRISPR Just Works. I can teach an undergraduate student with little lab experience to design, clone, transform, and select for a targeted gene knockout with CRISPR. Gene knockouts are piss easy. large deletions from simultaneous editing are less common but still predictable. homologous recombination-mediated gene editing works in animal cells, but isn't really a thing yet for plants.

[Anonymous No.11071326]

>>11071316
This. Thanks for taking the effort to type a good response. There's too much pseud content on biology on this board.

[Anonymous No.11071352]

>>11071326
glad to help. it's also worth noting that a lot of the work that goes into making GMOs actually has nothing to do with CRISPR or other gene editing techniques. most of the time we're not trying to knock out an endogenous site, we're trying to move traits from one cultivar to another.

for example - say you have a grain variety that grows well, but is super susceptible to disease. You look in the wild and see a cultivar of the same species that you'd never want to grow for a crop, but is super resistant to the disease that's giving you trouble. you figure out which genes are responsible for the disease resistance, stack them up in one plasmid, and transform them into the agriculturally valuable but disease-susceptible variety. the plasmid integrates into the genome in a random location, and as long as it doesn't land in anything important, you've got your GMO.