You may have briefly learned about this technology in your biology class, or heard about its fascinating applications in the news. Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats (CRISPR) is an innovative gene-editing tool, and its primary purpose is to alter DNA at precise and specific locations.
CRISPR is continuously being modified and advanced, and an exceptional example of such work can be seen with the recent creation of the Fast Locality- Sensitive Hashing-based clustering (FLSHclust) search algorithm, which has found 188 rare CRISPR bacterial systems. This program has been developed by a variety of scientific institutions, including work by researchers at the McGovern Institute for Brain Research at MIT, the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, and the National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI). Specifically, the experiment has been spearheaded by Dr. Feng Zhang, a co-senior author on the study. His team has worked with CRISPR technology for years, working hard to progress its effectiveness and applicability.
These newly discovered CRISPR systems each serve a variety of functions, ranging from RNA editing to being used as diagnostic tools. Incredibly, these tools even possess the ability to modify mammal cells with less unexpected side effects than existing systems. In order to obtain this data, FLSHclust works with three widely-used datasets which have information on countless bacteria genomes and protein sequences.
After launching this creation, scientists stress how the algorithm’s findings contribute to a broader understanding of biodiversity. The recently identified CRISPR systems contain bacteria that are found in a myriad of unique sources, including Antarctic waters and animal saliva. This underscores the significance of expanding sample size in scientific studies, and how the data obtained from these new systems can greatly benefit future research endeavors. Overall, this incredible finding has the potential to advance research in health, biotechnology, and other related fields, providing a diverse set of CRISPR systems that contain bacteria from virtually every corner of the planet.
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