HUMAN embryos have been genetically edited in the UK for the first time.
of the Francis Crick Institute in London and her colleagues studied spare embryos donated by couples who had IVF treatment. They used the CRISPR gene-editing technique to stop a gene from making a protein called OCT4. The results confirm that it is needed to help the embryo develop into a ball of about 200 cells called a blastocyst (Nature, ).
The gene has a different role in mice, showing the need to study human embryos, says Niakan.
“If we knew the key genes that embryos need to develop successfully, we could improve IVF treatments and understand some causes of pregnancy failure,” she says.
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But disabling genes using CRISPR is much easier than fixing them, so Niakan’s work tells us little about how genome editing could be used to prevent disease.
This article appeared in print under the headline “Human editing”
