Current and Prospective Applications of CRISPR-Cas12a in Pluricellular Organisms

CRISPR-Cas systems play a critical role in the prokaryotic adaptive immunity against mobile genetic elements, such as phages and foreign plasmids. In the last decade, Cas9 has been established as a powerful and versatile gene editing tool. In its wake, the novel RNA-guided endonuclease system CRISPR-Cas12a is transforming biological research due to its unique properties, such as its high specificity or its ability to target T-rich motifs, to induce staggered double-strand breaks and to process RNA arrays. Meanwhile, there is an increasing need for efficient and safe gene activation, repression or editing in pluricellular organisms for crop improvement, gene therapy, research model development, and other goals. In this article, we review CRISPR-Cas12a applications in pluricellular organisms and discuss how the challenges characteristic of these complex models, such as vectorization or temperature variations in ectothermic species, can be overcome.