The Korea Research Institute of Bioscience and Biotechnology (KRIBB, Director Kim Jang-sung) announced on November 5th that Hanyang University's College of Medicine Professor Hur Joon-ho’s team, the Korea National Prime Research Center Dr. Lee Seung-hwan’s team, and Future Animal Resources Center Dr. Kim Sun-wook’s team jointly developed a technology that can measure the target specificity of genetic scissors with ultra-sensitivity.

The CRISPR genetic scissor is a technique of reforming a dielectric substance by cutting off the DNA from a certain sequence. This is categorized into two methods of ‘Guide RNA’ that finds target DNA to be reformed and ‘lyase’, which cuts the target area.

The off-target problem of genetic scissor that unintentionally cuts non-target DNA parts instead of the targeted DNA is being pointed out. Various systems to inspect the malfunction of the genetic scissor have been established but it was difficult to catch less-than-1% malfunction due to low sensibility.

The research team developed a technique to verify off-target possibility by amplifying the reform object - target DNA – signal and utilizing the next-generation sequencing.

The research team confirmed through experiments that the less-than-1% malfunction target DNAs formed in genetic scissors can be precisely tracked on a sufficiently reliable level by the amplifying system.

Dr. Lee Seung-hwan, the chief of research, said, “This research result will not only contribute to the diverse genetic scissors that work based on guide RNA but also to developing genetic medicine to genetic illnesses and rare incurable diseases.”

Meanwhile, this research was progressed by the business support of The Ministry of Science and ICT and the National Research Foundation of Korea’s New Researcher Support Project and the National Research Council of Science & Technology’s Big Issue Group (BIG), and was published online in the international biology journal ‘Nature Communications’ on July 18th. (Paper title: Prediction-based highly sensitive CRISPR off-target validation using target-specific DNA enrichment)