Activity Detail
Seminar
CRISPR at the fringe
Chase Beisel
CRISPR-Cas systems represent not only versatile immune systems in bacteria but also the source of powerful biomolecular tools, technologies, and therapies Most of these technologies revolve around the Cas9 nuclease that uses its guide RNA to recognize and cleave matching DNA sequences. However, CRISPR as an immune system has evolved diverse mechanisms to recognize and combat invaders, from shredding target DNA to shutting down the infected host through tRNA cleavage. What remains unclear is how far this diversity extends--and how new discoveries can seed technology development. In this talk, I will describe my group's efforts to explore a small sliver of CRISPR biology hidden within a sub-type of CRISPR-Cas systems associated with target DNA cleavage. I will show how this sliver encodes incredible functional diversity that drove applications in programmable cell killing and multiplexed molecular diagnostics. Overall, this work underscores how much functional diversity could still be hidden within CRISPR biology, and how its exploration could drive the next generation of RNA-guided technologies.