In essence, these results simulated what happens in a cell during a CRISPR immune response but with only the minimum of components; no cellular molecules besides Cas9 and the two RNA molecules, which looked similar to the way they’d look inside a Streptococcus pyogenes cell, along with a DNA molecule mimicking the genome of a phage. Of critical importance was the fact that twenty of those DNA letters matched those of the CRISPR RNA, meaning that the CRISPR RNA and one of the two DNA strands should be able to form their own double helix through complementary base pairing. Such an RNA-DNA double
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