Review of CRISPR-assosiated proteins, their functions and patent situations

CRISPR-Cas (Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats) systems are a new revolutionary gene editing tool. CRISPR-Cas was originally discovered as a defense mechanism in bacteria and archaea. CRISPR has quickly become a preferred tool for genome editing applications over the course of last few years thanks to the ease of design and use of programmable nuclease enzymes, both in vivo and in vitro. Even though CRISPR nuclease Cas9 is the most used gene editing tool in CRISPR-Cas systems, other CRISPR-Cas proteins remain largely unexplored. The CRISPR-Cas9 “hype” has until recently left other Cas proteins in the shadow of the complex. That, and other aspects such as patent situation around Cas9 has brought researchers attention to studying and analyzing of other Cas-proteins in search for improvements and analogs of CRISPR-Cas9. There has been some confusion around CRISPR-Cas proteins for some time, due to absence of classification and nomenclature system for CRIPR-Cas systems. Non-coordinated researches resulted in a quick growth of discovered CRISPR-Cas proteins, but a number of them were homologues denoted under more than one name. There have been several attempts on achieving a classification system for the Cas-proteins in order to maintain this quickly growing field in genome editing tools. This thesis aims to make a simple overview of functions and patent situation around known CRISPR-Cas proteins, as well as analyzing alternatives to the widely used CRISPR-Cas9 complex for genome editing purposes