The Cas9 protein is the most widely used by scientists. This protein can easily be programmed to find and bind to almost any desired target sequence, simply by giving it a piece of RNA to guide it ...

Its primary component, the Cas9 enzyme (orange), cuts genomic DNA (blue). The enzyme is directed to its target--essentially any sequence along the genome--by hitching it to a strand of guide RNA ...

With CRISPR-Cas9, the crRNA/tracrRNA sequence or an artificial guide RNA indicate where the DNA can be cut. It is relatively easy for scientists to produce different sequence variants from RNA ...

This step is key to discriminating between off- and on-target DNA sequences by the Cas9 protein that matches its programmable guide RNA, a short sequence that directs DNA editing to precise ...