The Next Gene-Editing Technology May Also Be the Oldest

Over the past decade, the gene-editing technology known as CRISPR has become a familiar scientific tool, used to create lifesaving cures, make more productive crops, and even engineer allergy-free dogs.

But scientists didn’t invent CRISPR from scratch. They discovered it in bacteria and other microbes, which use it as a defense against invading viruses. On Thursday, scientists reported that they had found another gene-editing defense in nature, this one in viruses themselves.

This system, called VIPR, appears to be more than four billion years old, and it seems be the evolutionary ancestor of CRISPR, the researchers wrote in two papers published in Science.

It may prove to be the more powerful gene-editing tool, with certain advantages over CRISPR. VIPR seems able to target a wider variety of genetic sequences, allowing it to alter more of the genome.

And these molecules are smaller, making them potentially easier to deliver into cells.

“The incredibly small size of VIPR makes these systems transformative tools for genome engineering,” said Philip Kranzusch, a microbiologist at Harvard Medical School who was not involved in the research.

Jennifer Doudna, a biochemist at the University of California, Berkeley, who is an author of the studies, shared the Nobel Prize in 2020 for harnessing the power of CRISPR. After that breakthrough, she began wondering how the natural version of the gene editor evolved.