Treasure hunting in fungi and clams has led to the discovery of CRISPR-like proteins that can be RNA-programmed to edit human DNA.

“Nature doesn’t make jumps,” claimed many thinkers of the past, but modern-day geneticists can point to many exceptions to the rule. Transposons are mobile genes par excellence jumping from one point to another in the genome. In particular those associated with the OMEGA system, discovered two years ago in bacteria, head for chosen landing spots thanks to a kind of programmable GPS similar to CRISPR.

The news is that now such a phenomenon has also been detected in organisms with nucleated cells, so-called eukaryotes which include fungi, plants and animals. Feng Zhang’s group has already started engineering these programmable proteins, known as Fanzor, to turn them into efficient editing tools. Please see the paper in Nature, the article posted on the Broad Institute website and Zhang’s tweets.