Open Access

Lara Khedher

• Clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats, CRISPR, are located on DNA sequences, which encode for an antiviral defense mechanism in bacteria and archaea. Together with CRISPR-associated proteins, Cas endonucleases, CRISPR-Cas has emerged into a powerful platform for editing DNA and RNA. This thesis investigates the evolution and function of this prokaryotic defense mechanism and points out the three most applied CRISPR-Cas systems in relation to current applications in biotechnology. Furthermore, chances and challenges of named systems as well as a guideline for choosing the appropriate system with Cas endonucleases is framed. Therefore, several scientific databases were screened for the most informative and influential publications around the topic. Information was collected and organized in a reference management software. The utilized literature was tabularly denoted and gives an overview of the broad scope of CRISPR-Cas. The analysis of the topic shows, that CRISPR-Cas offers a broad application range with a huge chance for genome editing. A conclusion of this thesis is, that CRISPR-Cas has an enormous potential to be implemented for human genome editing. However, its challenges should be cleared beforehand. Further research has to be done to fully understand the impact CRISPR-Cas may have in future.