Yahui Chen

WuXi AppTec Co., Lt, Wuxi, 214000, Jiangsu, China
Author    Correspondence author
Computational Molecular Biology, 2024, Vol. 14, No. 6   
Received: 05 Nov., 2024    Accepted: 06 Dec., 2024    Published: 18 Dec., 2024

This is an open access article published under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Off-target effects may lead to genomic instability, cell death or other adverse consequences, which will affect the safety of therapeutic applications and the interpretation of research results. This review systematically evaluates the prediction and mitigation strategies of off-target effects in gene editing, focusing on the molecular mechanisms, detection and evaluation methods of off-target effects, and emerging technologies to improve the specificity of editing tools. By comparing the off-target characteristics of different gene editing tools, the sensitivity and specificity of experimental and computational prediction methods, the article summarizes the research progress in the current field and points out that the off-target effect control capabilities need to be further improved in the future to promote the safe and efficient application of gene editing technology in basic research and clinical applications.

Off-target effects; Genome editing; CRISPR/Cas systems; Molecular mechanisms; Specificity improvement