According to a Nature.com report, the CRISPR/Cas9 technique is completely revolutionizing genetic research. It is a technique that has already been used to engineer crops, livestock and gasp human embryos, and scientists are hopeful that it would ultimately be used for the treatment of disease.

Scientists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology conducted the study, published on Friday. During the study, researchers have found enzymes that can more accurately cut as compared to the CIRPSR technique, which can aim at a stretch of DNA, snip it out, and replace. This can result into extraordinary advances in medicine.

However this is not the end to what the developers of the CRISPR technique have found as one of the pioneers of the effort has discovered a path to make CRISPR simpler, and yet also quite more exact, based on a research, the journal Cell carriedlast week. The research was done by a research team at Broad Institute in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

The team was headed by synthetic biologist Feng Zhang. They have called the protein Cpf1 as the potential key to unlock the shortcomings of CRISPR-Cas9. The issue is that when the system functions for disabling genes, it doesn’t do a fine job of editing them by changing a DNA sequence with another.

CRISPR/Cas9 is a system that has developed as a way to for bacteria and anchaea to block invading viruses. The reports suggested that with the help of Cas9 enzyme, researchers cut DNA ‘at a site specified by guide strands of RNA’. Researchers used this information and were able to turn CRISPR/Cas9 into a ‘molecular biology powerhouse’ that can be used in other organisms.

CRISPRs (clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats) are segments of prokaryotic DNA containing short repetitions of base sequences. Each repetition is followed by short segments of "spacer DNA" from previous exposures to a bacterial virus or plasmid. It is pronounced "crisper".