CASTing Off for New Shores in Human Genome Editing
Type
Blog Post
Published
June 10, 2025, 1:15 p.m.
...called evoCAST — an evolved CRISPR-associated transposase (CAST).
Back up a second. What are CASTs?
CASTs...V-K CAST systems use a nuclease-deficient Cas12k (Gelsinger et al., 2024).
In either type of CAST, the...only CAST integration of the promoter could turn the gene on. Once phage success was linked to CAST efficiency...isolated these more efficient CASTs (Witte et al., 2025).
The best evoCAST featured 20 mutations in TnsB... bacterial genomes (Peters et al., 2017). Type I CAST systems rely on the Cascade complex minus its nuclease...even entire genes.
Figure 1: Mechanism of CAST systems. A Cas effector (Cascade in Type I systems...gRNA-specified sites. Created with BioRender.com.
CASTs quickly became popular bacterial genome engineering...