Abstract

Clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats (CRISPR) which is literally defined as a clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats is an adaptive immune system in bacteria, which enables them to detect and destroy the DNA of the virus. In fact, CRISPR is a defense mechanism in prokaryotic cells, which induces resistance to foreign genetic content, such as that found in the plasmid or phages. The proteins involved in this mechanism are called CRISPR associated proteins (CAS) which have the ability to search, cut and eventually transform phage DNA in a specific way. The CAS is a protein with an enzymatic function which can be called nuclease, given the fact that it plays a special role in the DNA sequence and CRISPR arrays. The CRISPR technology allows changes in DNA, which enables to modify and make any changes to any gene in any living creature, much more accurately and better than all previous methods. In this review, we introduce the mechanisms and benefits of CRISPR in genome editing, briefly reviewing CRISPR programs in gene therapy exploration and CRISPR’s ability to produce different types of mutations through different repair mechanisms. © 2020 The Author(s).