Difference between revisions of "Talk:CH391L/S14/CRISPR"

Revision as of 13:38, 1 April 2014

• --Dennis Mishler (talk) 08:38, 1 April 2014 (CDT) Gabo, you have a ton of information, which is great. My concern though is in the ordering of that information...

Here is something you e-mailed me: "The CRISPR/Cas system is an RNA-guided endonuclease system found naturally in many prokaryotes. CRISPR stands for Clustered Regularly Inter-Spaced Palindromic Repeats. This small genomic region (less than 1kb) is a critical part of the bacterial defense system against foreign DNA, mainly because it is known to retain genetic information about previous encounters with phage or plasmid DNA. Cas genes, are CRISPR associated genes that encode for several proteins with roles in the formation of the RNA-guided endonuclease complex."

Maybe you needed to change this paragraph a bit, but this was a very good introduction/starting description. I would add a paragraph like this before you go into the background/details. Originally, my one big request from this starting paragraph was to add a one-sentence simple explanation of what CRISPR does... (relating to bacterial defenses). When introducing material, you should start with the bigger/general picture, and then focus on the details.

• --Dennis Mishler (talk) 08:38, 1 April 2014 (CDT) Assuming you add an introduction, I would change the current "background" section to something indicating a comparison of different nuclease-mediated genome editing. This could (perhaps) be the second or third section, after the introduction.

• --Dennis Mishler (talk) 08:38, 1 April 2014 (CDT) I might move the "How the CRISPR/Cas system works" section to part of the introduction. Perhaps this would follow a first paragraph, which ends with hints of using CRISPR/Cas for genome engineering... and then describe the natural-occurring system and its elements... This is one idea, not sure if it is the best idea.

• --Dennis Mishler (talk) 08:38, 1 April 2014 (CDT)Applications of CRISPR/Cas should be more fleshed out. A single sentence describing some applications is okay, but we should also have more information regarding one or two experiments... and what about in mammalian cells? Or Embryos? Could you take 20 fertilized eggs, perform CRISPR/Cas engineering and get a designer baby? This last question is more speculative, but if you can easily re-engineer mammalian cells...