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Monkey Engineering

Researchers in China used the CRISPR/Cas9 system to engineer monkeys with certain gene modifications.

As they reported in Cell this week, Nanjing Medical University's Jiahao Sha and colleagues injected both Cas9 mRNA and sgRNAs into one-cell stage cynomolgus monkey embryos. In particular, they were able to target two genes at once. Modified embryos were transferred into surrogate mothers.

Sequencing of 15 embryos indicated that eight of them had mutations in both targeted genes.

"Our study shows that the CRISPR/Cas9 system enables simultaneous disruption of two target genes in one step without producing off-target mutations," Sha says in a statement. "Considering that many human diseases are caused by genetic abnormalities, targeted genetic modification in monkeys is invaluable for the generation of human disease models."

Technology Review adds that since genome editing appears to be able to modify monkeys, the approach could also eventually be used to genetically modify people. It also notes that CRISPR has been shown to be able to modify human cells in the lab.

“We believe the success of this strategy in nonhuman primates gives lots of potential for its application in humans, but we think due to the safety issue, it will take a long way for expanding this strategy to human embryos,” study coauthor Wezhi Ji, from the Yunnan Key Laboratory of Primate Biomedical Research, tells Tech Review.

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