Hola MaHigh-School - August 2018

Gene editing
indistinguishable from naturally occurring mutations.”
In short: the new technique Crispr-Cas9 gives us the opportunity
to identify a piece of the DNA we wish to alter, cut it out and provide
a new strand which might have been created by the scientist.
It is not necessarily something which nature designed. We design
it!
Let us rewind a bit on this:
We need to invent a ‘scissor’ that will recognise a specific sequence.
What if this sequence is also found somewhere else in the
strand of DNA, not where we want to cut? So we can cut something
else and we might never know? Until we see the result? The
organism does not do what we intended it to do. Because we cut
the wrong piece! And what we inserted does not make sense at
that place in the DNA.
Now what? Exactly!
We now insert a designer piece of DNA. Do we really know what
it will code for? So we ‘edit’ a piece of DNA and insert it in a living
organism and now we can see the change. Crop yields or immune
to cancer. But if we get it a bit wrong? Exactly!