Recent advances of the biological and biomedical applications of CRISPR/Cas systems

The clustered, regularly interspaced, short palindromic repeats (CRISPR)-associated endonuclease (Cas) system, referred to as CRISPR/Cas system, has attracted significant interest in scientific community due to its great potential in translating into versatile therapeutic tools in biomedical field. For instance, a myriad of studies has demonstrated that the CRISPR/Cas system is capable of detecting various types of viruses, killing antibiotic-resistant bacteria, treating inherited genetic diseases, and providing new strategies for cancer therapy. Furthermore, CRISPR/Cas systems are also exploited as research tools such as genome engineering tool that allows researchers to interrogate the biological roles of unexplored genes or uncover novel functions of known genes. Additionally, the CRISPR/Cas system has been employed to edit the genome of a wide range of eukaryotic, prokaryotic organisms and experimental models, including but not limited to mammalian cells, mice, zebrafish, plants, yeast, and Escherichia coli. The present review mainly focuses on summarizing recent discoveries regarding the type II CRISPR/Cas9 and type VI CRISPR/Cas13a systems to give researchers a glimpse of their potential applications in the biological and biomedical field.