At Last: Gene Editing in Human Embryos to Understand Human Development.

Our understanding of early human development is typically based on inference from animal models, which may not fully recapitulate human embryonic features. As proof of concept, Fogarty et al. (2017) used CRISPR/Cas9 to genetically ablate the OCT4 gene in human preimplantation embryos and found key differences from its function in model systems.