Collateral damage and CRISPR genome editing

by Mark Thomas, Gaetan Burgio, David J. Adams, Vivek Iyer

The simplicity and the versatility of clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats/CRISPR-associated protein (CRISPR-Cas) systems have enabled the genetic modification of virtually every organism and offer immense therapeutic potential for the treatment of human disease. Although these systems may function efficiently within eukaryotic cells, there remain concerns about the accuracy of Cas endonuclease effectors and their use for precise gene editing. Recently, two independent reports investigating the editing accuracy of the CRISPR-Cas9 system were published by separate groups at the Wellcome Sanger Institute; our study—Iyer and colleagues [1]—defined the landscape of off-target mutations, whereas the other by Kosicki and colleagues [2] detailed the existence of on-target, potentially deleterious deletions. Although both studies found evidence of large on-target CRISPR-induced deletions, they reached seemingly very different conclusions.