[Are the Argonauts lost at sea?].

A novel gene editing procedure based on a nuclease from the Argonaute protein family was described in mid-2016 and appeared to provide significant advantages over the now widely used CRISPR-Cas9 system. Attempts by numerous groups to use this technique have however been unsuccessful; several negative reports have been published in addition to many accounts of failure found in the "grey literature". It is unclear at this point whether this reflects an (unknown) critical experimental factor or hints at data misinterpretation, possibly even at outright fabrication of results.