A transformative technology for gene editing - clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats (CRISPR) -- has become ubiquitous, at least in research laboratories, where scientists efficiently adopted CRISPR technology to manipulate genes of interest. Still, applying it for humans is associated with greater risks and faces ethical issues. However, alongside a too reckless experiment of a Chinese scientist who edited babies’ genomes, plenty of companies have made well-thought progress toward transferring gene editing technologies into the clinic. Here we make a brief but pithy review on up-to-date gene editing approaches and start-up companies active in this area.

About one in three human proteins is understudied. Even when quantifying data is available from multiple sources, "dark" genes and proteins are simply not well characterized (Figure 1).

There may be multiple reasons why dark genes are ignored, although the literature isn't always in agreement with data availability.

Are you curious where dark gene hunting leads? There are a number of resources: