I pity the 15 percent of the human population that cannot live with a cat, due to allergy. I've seen it happen, a guest's face blowing up. My best friend Wendy can visit here, where cats outnumber people two-to-one, only by megadosing on antihistamines and heading to the porch to breathe periodically. Even with that she's good for only a day or two.
But CRISPR gene editing may come to the rescue, someday.
Snip out the gene that encodes a protein called Fel d 1, and the kitty can no longer make a hapless human's eyes and nose run and bronchioles constrict in an asthma attack. That's what Nicole F. Brackett and a team from InBio have done in cat cells. Their work was just published in The CRISPR Journal. (If googling makes this news seems recycled, it's because an abstract appeared just before the world shut down in early 2020.)
CRISPR is a tool that can remove, replace, or add a selected bit of DNA to a chromosome. To counter cat allergy, CRISPR would delete the genes that encode the offending allergen.
To continue reading, go to my blog DNA Science, where this post first appeared.