Just under a year ago, a molecular-biology technique was thrust onto the world stage. Researchers in China announced that they had used the nascent gene-editing tool CRISPR–Cas9 to modify the genomes of human embryos, triggering a major ethics debate.
Yet while this controversy has been playing out, researchers the world over have rushed to use the tool to tinker with the genomes of human somatic cells, viruses, bacteria, animals and plants, and it's in these contexts that the technique promises to have more immediate impact. This issue of Nature examines what's going on at the CRISPR frontiers.
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