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by shpongled 2199 days ago
Even in standard CRISPR/Cas9 systems, Cas9 sticks around for quite a while - which is one of the issues in using it for actual medical treatments. You don't really want a programmable DNA cleavage engine roaming around in your nucleus...

The primary benefit here is that you can temporally synchronize Cas9. In standard systems, you introduce Cas9 into the cell, and you have no control over when it performs cleavage, since it's essentially a greedy cleavage mechanism - as soon as it finds a match, it cleaves.

This system basically introduces a semaphore, so that you introduce Cas9, allow it find a match and pause. You can then signal for cleavage to begin. As stated in the abstract, this is useful for e.g. studying the kinetics of DNA repair, since you can control when DNA damage (Cas9 cleavage) is happening.

1 comments

Fascinating. Thank you so much for taking the time to explain further!