When small tweaks aren’t enough and massive DNA interventions are needed, a new biotech tool inspired by a peculiar class of jumping sequences may come to the rescue.
Barbara McClintock discovered mobile genes in the 1940s, and since then these transposable elements have never ceased to amaze.

What seemed like a bizarre exception to genome stability has, over time, proven to be an influential and widespread phenomenon. Transposons and insertion sequences jumping here and there can break important genes causing deleterious effects, but also generate useful combinations shuffling the cards of evolution.

Recently they have also turned out to be a mine of potential biotech tools. Some (IS200/605) are considered the ancestors of CRISPR. Others (IS110) are inspiring “bridge editing”, a new approach to genomic design described in three papers in Nature and Nature Communications.

You can read the features published in Nature, GEN and New Scientist. The CRISPR Journal did not have time to include bridge editing in its editorial, but it did hit the point by writing that more is sure to come:

“The editing toolbox now encompasses base editors (with deaminases), prime editors (with reverse transcriptases), PASTE (with recombinases) and CAST/CasTn (with transposases). […] At a time of AI-enabled synthetic biology, we can now forecast the further development of molecular machines that will more efficiently manipulate the genome, the transcriptome, and the epigenome.”