Systematic discovery of natural CRISPR-Cas12a inhibitors

Cas12 inhibitors join the anti-CRISPR family Bacteria and their phages continually coevolve in a molecular arms race. For example, phages use anti-CRISPR proteins to inhibit the bacterial type I and II CRISPR systems (see the Perspective by Koonin and Makarova). Watters et al. and Marino et al. used bioinformatic and experimental approaches to identify inhibitors of type V CRISPR-Cas12a. Cas12a has been successfully engineered for gene editing and nucleic acid detection. Some of the anti-Cas12a proteins identified in these studies had broad-spectrum inhibitory effects on Cas12a orthologs and could block Cas12a-mediated genome editing in human cells. Science , this issue p. 236 , p. 240 ; see also p. 156