Role of CRISPR/Cas9 and other gene editing/engineering technology in intestine diseases

A tremendous effort has been made over decades to develop technology to edit the genome. Genomes are composed of billions of DNA bases and contain all of the genetic information from organisms. The possibility to change DNA bases at precise sites sheds light on many perspectives, not only molecular biology but also applications in medicine and agriculture. Genome editing tools have come to the revolutionary point when CRISPR-Cas9 was discovered and developed by several pioneers. It is known as a system consisting of a short guide RNA which could lead Cas9 protein to specific locations for editing the genome. It becomes a robust, simple, and widely used approach in the scientific community. Compared with the other tools, zinc finger nucleases, and transcription activator-like effector proteins, CRISPR-Cas9 is the easiest and the most flexible tool to apply for different species. And the editing efficiency is the same or higher than the other methods. In this chapter, the CRISPR-Cas9 system will be focused and other genetic editing tools will be briefly mentioned. Following this, challenges of the CRISPR-Cas9 system confront in the future will be discussed