Hi and welcome to the inaugural edition of the A16Z BioJournal Club. I'm Hannah. Our goal here is to take an

interesting new research paper in the field and talk about why it's cool, break down a little of

the science involved, and consider what the implications of this research for industry might be.

So in our first take, A16Z general partner on the biofund Jorge Condé and deal team partner

Andy Tran chat with me

about two papers recently published. The first, transposon encoded CRISPR-CAS system's direct RNA-guided

DNA integration was published by a group under Samuel H. Sternberg at Columbia in Nature of June

2019. The second is RNA-guided DNA insertion with CRISPR-associated transposases

with a team under Feng Zhang from the Broad Institute, published in science also in June 2019.

We talk about what these papers are all about in the field of CRISPR development and beyond.

This mini podcast is available as part of our new

A16Z bio newsletter. So if you like it and you want to hear more or read more, please sign up for the

newsletter at A16Z.com forward slash subscribe. Let's talk about what specifically is happening here.

What does what does transposon encoded CRISPRCAS system direct RNA guided DNA integration?

Like what does that actually mean? Can you help me understand what was the interesting science that was

going on here? Yeah. So what's really interesting in the field of CRISPR lately and actually a few papers,

you know, that came out in the recent times, developed a way to basically use these transposion machinery

inside the cell and use CRISPR to direct it into

specific places in the genome and really edit the genome without cutting it open at all.

So you can think of it as this scarless type of genetic modification.

Essentially what a transposon is is this sort of phenomenon that's been observed where you have

sort of these genes

...