Related Experiment Video
Updated: Oct 11, 2025

Construction of Homozygous Mutants of Migratory Locust Using CRISPR/Cas9 Technology
Published on: March 16, 2022
Search and Localization Dynamics of the CRISPR-Cas9 System
Qiao Lu1, Deepak Bhat1, Darya Stepanenko1,2,3
1Biological Complexity Unit, Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology Graduate University, Onna, Okinawa 904-0495, Japan.
Abstract:
The CRISPR-Cas9 system acts as the prokaryotic immune system and has important applications in gene editing. The protein Cas9 is one of its crucial components. The role of Cas9 is to search for specific target sequences on the DNA and cleave them. In this Letter, we introduce a model of facilitated diffusion for Cas9 and fit its parameters to single-molecule experiments. Our model confirms that Cas9 search for targets by sliding, but shows that its sliding length is rather short. We then investigate how Cas9 explores a long stretch of DNA containing randomly placed targets. We solve this problem by mapping it into the theory of Anderson localization in condensed matter physics. Our theoretical approach rationalizes experimental evidence on the distribution of Cas9 molecules along the DNA.
Related Concept Videos
CRISPR
CRISPR/Cas9 Genome Editing
CRISPR and crRNAs
The CRISPR-Cas system stores a copy of foreign DNA in the host genome and uses it to identify the foreign DNA upon reinfection. CRISPR-Cas has three different...
The Antiviral System of Bacteria and Archaea: CRISPR
Homologous Recombination
Conservative Site-specific Recombination and Phase Variation
The recognition sites for Cre recombinase called LoxP...

