What is Prime Editing?

Prime editing is a "search and replace" genome editing technology that directly writes new genetic information into a specified DNA site. It uses a prime editing guide RNA (pegRNA) to both target the specific DNA location and to contain the desired new DNA sequence to be inserted. A prime editing enzyme, which is a Cas9 nickase fused to a reverse transcriptase, uses the pegRNA to nick the targeted DNA strand and then copy the new DNA sequence from the pegRNA template into the nicked strand. This allows for precise and versatile genome editing, including insertions, deletions, and all 12 possible base-to-base conversions.