Are Hybrid Guide RNAs Right for Your CRISPR Application?
Type
Blog Post
Published
Jan. 27, 2026, 2:14 p.m.
...to specific genomic targets.
Hybrid guides are oligonucleotides with a mixture of DNA and RNA bases. ...you want your hybrid guide to be effective.
Which bases can be substituted?
A guide RNA has many parts....reduced, but hybrid guides are unlikely to impact other kinds of unintended edits, like guide-independent deamination...The genome-editing tool CRISPR is famously RNA-guided... except when it’s not. Turns out, carefully designed...long as specific protein-contacting bases were avoided (Yin et al., 2018).
Figure 1: The seed, ...reduced off-target effects, this means the hybrid guides are more specific.
Reduced bystander editing by... the target base. It’s not yet clear why hybrid guides reduce bystander editing, and other kinds of base...