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The ultimate potential of precision gene-editing techniques is beginning to be realised. Today, researchers in China report the first monkeys engineered with targeted mutations1, an achievement that could be a stepping stone to making more realistic research models of human diseases.
Xingxu Huang, a geneticist at the Model Animal Research Center of Nanjing University in China, and his colleagues successfully engineered twin cynomolgus monkeys (Macaca fascicularis) with two targeted mutations using the CRISPR/Cas9 system — a technology that has taken the field of genetic engineering by storm in the past year. Researchers have leveraged the technique to disrupt genes in mice and rats2, 3, but until now none had succeeded in primates.
"This is an important step," says Feng Zhang, a synthetic biologist who was not involved in the study, but who has helped to develop CRISPR technology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge. "It shows that the system is working."
Primate push
Transgenic mice have long dominated as models for human diseases, in part because scientists have honed a gene-editing...
Xingxu Huang, a geneticist at the Model Animal Research Center of Nanjing University in China, and his colleagues successfully engineered twin cynomolgus monkeys (Macaca fascicularis) with two targeted mutations using the CRISPR/Cas9 system — a technology that has taken the field of genetic engineering by storm in the past year. Researchers have leveraged the technique to disrupt genes in mice and rats2, 3, but until now none had succeeded in primates.
"This is an important step," says Feng Zhang, a synthetic biologist who was not involved in the study, but who has helped to develop CRISPR technology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge. "It shows that the system is working."
Primate push
Transgenic mice have long dominated as models for human diseases, in part because scientists have honed a gene-editing...