Discussions

Microbial cell factories are a promising mode of production for fuels, chemicals, and pharmaceuticals because microbial methods are often clean and renewable. However, genome engineering is a slow, inefficient, and arduous process that limits microbial producers. The emerging Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats (CRISPR) system has greatly improved the efficiency of genome editing and simplified multilocus genome editing steps. It has also enabled the rapid disruption of metabolic networks. The CRISPR system is an adaptive immune system that allows prokaryotes to defend themselves against the invasion of foreign DNA/RNA from viruses or other organisms. The CRISPR/Cas system is widely used in basic research and biotechnology applications, including genome editing, molecular diagnosis, metabolic engineering, and gene function mining in microorganisms, plants, and mammals.