The Importance of Crispr/Cas9

Cas9 protein is an RNA-guided DNA endonuclease enzyme associated with the CRISPR (Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats) adaptive immunity system in Streptococcus pyogenes, among other bacteria. S. pyogenes utilizes Cas9 protein to memorize and later interrogate and cleave foreign DNA, such as invading bacteriophage DNA or plasmid DNA. Cas9 protein performs this interrogation by unwinding foreign DNA and checking whether it is complementary to the 20 basepair spacer region of the guide RNA. If the DNA substrate is complementary to the guide RNA, Cas9 protein cleaves the invading DNA. In this sense, the Cas9 Protein mechanism has a number of parallels with the RNA interference (RNAi) mechanism in eukaryotes.
Cas9 protein has gained traction in recent years because it can cleave nearly any sequence complementary to the guide RNA. Because the target specificity of Cas9 protein stems from the guide RNA: DNA complementarily and not modifications to the protein itself (like TALENs and Zinc-fingers), engineering Cas9 protein to target new DNA is straightforward. Versions of Cas9 protein that bind but do not cleave cognate DNA can be used to localize transcriptional activator or repressors to specific DNA sequences in order to control transcriptional activation and repression. Cas9 protein features a bi-lobed architecture with the guide RNA nestled between the alpha-helical lobe (blue) and the nuclease lobe (cyan, orange and gray). These two lobes are connected through a single bridge helix. There are two nuclease domains located in the multi-domain nuclease lobe. Cas9 undergoes distinct conformational changes between the apo.
The simplicity of the type II CRISPR nuclease, with only three required components (Cas9 along with the crRNA and trRNA) makes this system amenable to adaptation for genome editing. This potential was realized in 2012 by the Doudna and Charpentier labs. Based on the type II crispr cas9 system described previously, the authors developed a simplified two-component system by combining trRNA and crRNA into a single synthetic single guide RNA (sgRNA). sgRNA programmed crispr/cas9 was shown to be as effective as Cas9 programmed with separate trRNA and crRNA in guiding targeted gene alterations.