A domestic research team has developed, for the first time in the world, a system that can turn genes on and off simultaneously.
A joint team led by Lee Ju-young, a professor at the Graduate School of Convergence Biosciences and the Department of Biological Sciences at the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST), and Noh Myeong-hyeon, a senior researcher at the Korea Research Institute of Chemical Technology (KRICT), said on the 21st that it developed a dual-mode CRISPR gene-editing system in Escherichia coli that can turn desired genes on and off at the same time. The results were published online on Aug. 21 in the international journal Nucleic Acids Research.
Turning genes on and off means, like flipping a light switch up or down, controlling whether genes in cells operate, thereby making the production of proteins or substances active or suppressing their production.
However, existing gene-editing tools were mainly specialized for turning genes off (repression), so they excelled at blocking gene expression, but the function of turning genes on was very limited. In addition, the range of genes that could be regulated was limited, and in bacteria, gene activation did not work properly.
To overcome this limitation, the researchers expanded access to more genes and greatly improved gene activation performance by using Escherichia coli proteins.
Based on this, they developed a gene-editing system that can control turning on and off simultaneously. In experiments to turn genes on, expression increased by up to 4.9 times, and in experiments to turn genes off, expression was suppressed by up to 83%. They were also able to regulate two different genes at the same time, successfully activating one gene by 8.6 times while simultaneously suppressing the other by 90%.
Lee Ju-young said, "This study combines gene-editing and synthetic biology to greatly improve the efficiency of microbial production platforms," adding, "It presents a new research paradigm by enabling the control of complex gene networks with a single system." She added, "This technology has also been confirmed to work in other bacterial species and can be applied in various fields, including the production of biopharmaceuticals, chemicals, and fuels."
References
Nucleic Acids Research (2025), DOI: https://doi.org/10.1093/nar/gkaf818