title: CRISPR/Cas9-The ultimate weapon to battle infectious diseases?
abstract: Infectious diseases are a leading cause of death worldwide. Novel therapeutics are urgently required to treat multidrug-resistant organisms such as Mycobacterium tuberculosis and to mitigate morbidity and mortality caused by acute infections such as malaria and dengue fever virus as well as chronic infections such as human immunodeficiency virus-1 and hepatitis B virus. The clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats (CRISPR)/CRISPR-associated protein 9 (Cas9) system, which has revolutionized biomedical research, holds great promise for the identification and validation of novel drug targets. Since its discovery as an adaptive immune system in prokaryotes, the CRISPR/Cas9 system has been developed into a multi-faceted genetic modification tool, which can now be used to induce gene deletions or specific gene insertions, such as conditional alleles or endogenous reporters in virtually any organism. The generation of CRISPR/Cas9 libraries that can be used to perform phenotypic whole genome screens provides an important new tool that will aid in the identification of critical host factors involved in the pathogenesis of infectious diseases. In this review, we will discuss the development and recent applications of the CRISPR/Cas9 system used to identify novel regulators, which might become important in the fight against infectious diseases.
authors.affiliation: Walter and Eliza Hall Institute of Medical Research, Parkville, VIC, Australia.|Department of Medical Biology, University of Melbourne, Parkville, VIC, Australia.
authors.forename: M
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Doerflinger
authors.affiliation: Walter and Eliza Hall Institute of Medical Research, Parkville, VIC, Australia.
authors.forename: W
authors.initials: W
authors.lastname: Forsyth
authors.affiliation: Walter and Eliza Hall Institute of Medical Research, Parkville, VIC, Australia.|Department of Medical Biology, University of Melbourne, Parkville, VIC, Australia.
authors.forename: G
authors.initials: G
authors.lastname: Ebert
authors.affiliation: Walter and Eliza Hall Institute of Medical Research, Parkville, VIC, Australia.|Department of Medical Biology, University of Melbourne, Parkville, VIC, Australia.
authors.forename: M
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Pellegrini
authors.affiliation: Walter and Eliza Hall Institute of Medical Research, Parkville, VIC, Australia.|Department of Medical Biology, University of Melbourne, Parkville, VIC, Australia.
authors.forename: M J
authors.initials: MJ
authors.lastname: Herold
mesh_terms: D000818:Animals; D001424:Bacterial Infections / Q000473:pathology*; D064113:CRISPR-Cas Systems; D018390:Gene Targeting / Q000379:methods*; D054884:Host-Pathogen Interactions; D006801:Humans; D010272:Parasitic Diseases / Q000473:pathology*; D014777:Virus Diseases / Q000473:pathology*
keywords: CRISPR/Cas9; functional genomic screens; infectious disease