The Advancement and Applications of Prime Editing

Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats (CRISPR), an exceptionally potent genome-editing technique developed in 2012, is the ideal tool of the future for treating diseases by permanently correcting deleterious base mutations or disrupting disease-causing genes with great precision and efficiency. However, it is prone to cleaving double-stranded DNA in off-target genes and generating random mutations in the process. These drawbacks restrict its application in fundamental research and agriculture, and raises safety concerns in the field of medicine. Fortunately, the new gene editing technology derived from CRISPR/Cas9, known as prime editing, has the potential to provide targeted sequence insertion, deletion, and transversion, all while avoiding the formation of double-strand breaks, thus minimizing adverse effects. Meanwhile, the rapid development of this technology makes its application wider and broader. This review summarizes the current developments and optimizations of the prime editing (PE) system with improved editing efficiency and precision. Along with discussing the most recent delivery techniques and outlining the PE applications that are being used both in vitro and in vivo.