China’s chromosome editing tool could unlock new wave of genetic advances

A group of Chinese scientists has overcome a challenge that stumped biologists for decades by developing a new gene-editing tool that can precisely manipulate millions of base pairs – the building blocks of DNA.

The innovation has been hailed as “very significant progress” by Professor Yin Hao, a gene editing specialist at Wuhan University’s medical research institute, who was not involved in the study. He added that it would help lay the foundation for future advances in genetic engineering in biomedicine and agriculture.

A single human cell contains around 3 billion base pairs. Well-known technologies such as Crispr are widely used for the precise editing of specific genes and nucleic acid bases. However, biologists have struggled to scale up the process to precisely manipulate thousands or even millions of bases.

Now, a team led by Gao Caixia – a principal investigator at the Institute of Genetics and Developmental Biology at the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Beijing – has solved the riddle by making the decade-old gene editing tool much easier to use and more efficient. The study was published by the peer-reviewed journal Cell on Monday.

The new genome editing technologies, collectively known as programmable chromosome engineering (PCE) systems, can edit large DNA fragments with precision by “handling bases ranging from the thousands to the millions in higher organisms, especially plants”, according to the institute.

The toolset holds promise for transforming the way scientists conduct research in emerging fields such as agricultural seed cultivation and synthetic biology.

According to a CAS branch institute in Beijing, by manipulating genomic structural variation, the technology will “open up new avenues for crop trait improvement and genetic disease treatment”.

The advance could also accelerate the development of artificial chromosomes, which have promising applications in emerging fields such as synthetic biology.

South China Morning Post