CRISPR Prime Editors Unleashed

“United we stand, divided we… small?”

CRISPR prime editing, introduced in 2019, harnesses a Frankensteinian enzyme–a Cas nickase fused to a reverse transcriptase–to perform gene edits with putatively higher fidelity than traditional CRISPR/Cas genome editing systems. In this SNiP, we highlight recent work from Grünewald et al. that shows the prime editor fusion can be split without negative consequence to editing, suggesting that the nickase and reverse transcriptase modules operate in trans. This finding is a boon for delivery and use of prime editing machinery with space-constrained vectors, such as AAV and lentiviral vectors.

Read on to learn more about prime editing and the authors’ discovery.