Neuroscience faculty member Stephen Brohawn and a former graduate student in his lab, Trevor Docter, collaborated on a pair of new studies (paper 1; paper 2) led by UC Berkeley professor and Nobel laureate Jennifer Doudna, published in Science, that report the discovery of an ancient ancestor of CRISPR systems called VIPR (viral interference programmable repeat) in viruses, which uses a never-before-seen coding system and could potentially be used as an even better gene-editing tool than CRISPR.
The researchers used AI tools to help them find VIPR, and Brohawn’s lab helped determine its structure and how it functions. They found that VIPR — which, like CRISPR, is a defense system to fight off invading viruses — uses a “gapped” code to identify target viral DNA sequences and wraps around targeted DNA to turn off genes. VIPR has advantages over CRISPR as a potential gene-editing tool because of its smaller size and its ability to target anywhere in a genome.