Editing gut bacteria is next frontier for Crispr (with Precision Microbiome Editing)

Editing the genomes of our gut bacteria will “create a whole new field of biology” in the coming decades, a Nobel prize-winning geneticist has said at the opening of a London summit on the future of human genetic engineering.

Jennifer Doudna, from the University of California Berkeley, said that tweaking the DNA of the bacteria that live in our guts has the potential to help us understand and combat many diseases in humans.

Conditions from Alzheimer’s to asthma have been linked to the composition of our microbiome but the population of our gut is difficult to study and treatments designed to alter its composition so far are imprecise and based on taking faecal transplants.

Read the original article in The Times.