The smaller size of Fanzors compared to Cas9 is appealing and the potential for lower immunogenicity could end up being very important for multiplex editing (if inflammation in off-target tissues is a big issue, or if an immune response in the brain turns out to be a risk).
The most important things are probably editing efficiency and the ratio of intended to unintended edits. Hard to know how that will shake out until we have Fanzor equivalents of base and prime editors.
I hadn’t even heard of Fanzors before you mentioned them. Very interesting.
So it’s basically an endonuclease native to eukaryotes! After a brief search I haven’t been able to find any papers in which it has been used as an editor.
The best case scenario here would be that the cieling for editing efficiency and specificity for Fanzor-based editors would be higher than for CRISPR-based alternatives. I am unsure at the moment whether that’s true, and we likely won’t know for a little while.
Minicircles are cool, but they just seem like… small plasmids? Granted I am not an expert on this topic and they definitely have advantages over SOME types of plasmids, such as those that contain CpG sequences, which can trigger TLR9 activation and get the immune system riled up.
I mean they’re great in the sense that a plasmid that doesn’t contain bacterial genes and can fit in a delivery vector like an AAV are great. I just don’t really see them as a separate category of thing we haven’t had before.
This may be far future, but what do you think of Fanzors over CRISPRs?
Also Minicircles?
The smaller size of Fanzors compared to Cas9 is appealing and the potential for lower immunogenicity could end up being very important for multiplex editing (if inflammation in off-target tissues is a big issue, or if an immune response in the brain turns out to be a risk).
The most important things are probably editing efficiency and the ratio of intended to unintended edits. Hard to know how that will shake out until we have Fanzor equivalents of base and prime editors.
I hadn’t even heard of Fanzors before you mentioned them. Very interesting.
So it’s basically an endonuclease native to eukaryotes! After a brief search I haven’t been able to find any papers in which it has been used as an editor.
The best case scenario here would be that the cieling for editing efficiency and specificity for Fanzor-based editors would be higher than for CRISPR-based alternatives. I am unsure at the moment whether that’s true, and we likely won’t know for a little while.
Minicircles are cool, but they just seem like… small plasmids? Granted I am not an expert on this topic and they definitely have advantages over SOME types of plasmids, such as those that contain CpG sequences, which can trigger TLR9 activation and get the immune system riled up.
I mean they’re great in the sense that a plasmid that doesn’t contain bacterial genes and can fit in a delivery vector like an AAV are great. I just don’t really see them as a separate category of thing we haven’t had before.
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