Researchers have identified a new gene-editing system similar to CRISPR in complex organisms, demonstrating for the first time that DNA-modifying proteins exist across all kingdoms of life.
Feng Zhang, a biochemist at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard and the McGovern Institute for Brain Research at MIT, led the team and previously co-discovered the gene-editing potential of the CRISPR-Cas9 system, which functions as a kind of "molecular scissors" that remove sections of DNA, thus disabling genes or allowing new ones to be swapped in.
