{"id":3992,"date":"2019-08-03T23:29:31","date_gmt":"2019-08-03T14:29:31","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/163.180.4.222\/lab\/?p=3992"},"modified":"2019-08-03T23:33:54","modified_gmt":"2019-08-03T14:33:54","slug":"chinas-crispr-revolution","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/biochemistry.khu.ac.kr\/lab\/?p=3992","title":{"rendered":"China’s CRISPR revolution"},"content":{"rendered":"

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Editing of plant, animal, and human genomes has never been easier, as this country’s scientists are rapidly demonstrating.<\/p>\n

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FOR MANY PEOPLE<\/strong>, CRISPR plus China equals the biophysicist He Jiankui, who infamously used the genome editor last year to alter the DNA of two human embryos that would become twin girls. Before his announcement, He was little-known within the country’s CRISPR community, which has grown rapidly and is now challenging\u2014and by some measures surpassing\u2014the United States in its use of the powerful tool (see graphics, below).<\/p>\n

A better representative of CRISPR in China is plant biologist Li Jiayang of the Institute of Genetics and Developmental Biology in Beijing. Li left the country in 1985 for his graduate education, as have many of China’s best and brightest young scientists over the past few decades, and then returned home in 1995 to focus on manipulating plant DNA. Li, who recently ended a stint as head of the Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences, says he struggled for years to make pinpoint genome edits. CRISPR gave him a simple, fast way to do just that, turbocharging his efforts to modify rice. \u201cNow, suddenly, the dreams come true,\u201d says Li, whose lab is humming at 9 p.m. on a Wednesday with two dozen members of his team running experiments.<\/p>\n

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A technician in Gao Caixia’s lab selects immature wheat embryos for CRISPR editing.<\/p>\n

PHOTO: STEFEN CHOW<\/q><\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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The lights are burning late at CRISPR labs around the world. In 2012, the year researchers transformed a bacterial immune system into the fast and versatile tool for genome engineering, scientific publications mentioning CRISPR totaled 127. Since then there have been more than 14,000. Although the United States has had the most CRISPR publications\u2014and continues to have the most cited papers\u2014China is now a close second and is pouring money into CRISPR’s uses.<\/p>\n

With support from the Pulitzer Center,\u00a0Science<\/em>\u00a0visited scientists in five Chinese cities who are harnessing CRISPR in a wide range of disciplines. China’s biggest push is in agriculture (see p.\u00a0422<\/a>) but researchers there are also applying the editor on a large scale in animals (see p.\u00a0426<\/a>), with pig organs for human transplants the most provocative goal. And China is aggressively exploring genome editing in medicine, having launched far more clinical trials using CRISPR, mainly for cancer, than any country (Science<\/em>, 6 October 2017, p.\u00a020<\/a>).<\/p>\n

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