Genome Editing Technologies and Its Application in Insects

Genome editing technologies are important for functional genomics study and application. Zinc finger nucleases (ZFNs), transcription activitor-like effector nucleases (TALENs) and clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats/CRISPR associated protein (CRISPR/Cas) system are three major genome editing technologies established in recent years. Mutagenesis induced by these three techniques is mainly through making double strand break (DSB) at a specific site and followed by DSB repair process. ZFNs is the first established genome editing technology which could be used to operate site-specific knock out and knock in. However, the ZFNs technology suffers from construction complexity, high cost and other problems. The TALENs technology, which was developed based on the ZFNs technology, is much better than ZFNs technology for higher flexibility and lower cost. The CRISPR/Cas system is different from ZFNs and TALENs technologies for its unique targeting mechanism which makes this technology more suitable for multiplexed targeting. Until now, all these technologies have been successfully tested in a number of organisms, e.g., mouse, zebrafish, fruit fly, nematode, silkworm. These genome editing tools will play important roles in future functional genomics study in the post genome era.