New CRISPR-based map ties every human gene to its function | MIT News
news.mit.edu/2022/crispr-based-map-ties-every-human-gene-to-its-function-0609
What Jamie wrote
When I read Crack in Creation I was blown away by the capabilities of CRISPR. One of the most striking analogies used to describe it was that CRISPR was to gene editing what the PC was to computing. That is a massive conjecture. It is hard to even imagine what that means if true.
The Perturb-seq method uses CRISPR-Cas9 genome editing to introduce genetic changes into cells, and then uses single-cell RNA sequencing to capture information about the RNAs that are expressed resulting from a given genetic change. Because RNAs control all aspects of how cells behave, this method can help decode the many cellular effects of genetic changes.
This is an incredible level of detail. It will be curious to me how far we can go, and my constant caution here is organic entities are fundamentally analog, and that we can only understand them so far. Like a fractal, no matter how far you zoom in, there is still more detail to discover.