Next generation gene editors engineered to significantly reduce error rate
By 
Julia Robinson2025-09-26T10:22:00
Introducing mutations into DNA-snipping ‘molecular scissors’ can result in 60-fold reduction in errors
The error rate of a promising gene-editing tool can be reduced up to 60-fold by introducing mutations that change where the system’s enzyme cuts the DNA strand, a new study has found. The researchers say this ‘next generation’ prime editor could form the basis for a range of advanced tools and applications.
Based on Crispr, prime editing is one of the newest types of genome editing, however a key remaining challenge with the approach is its error rate. In this study, researchers from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), US, set out to see if they could find a way to engineer the errors out of prime-editing systems.