CRISPR as a Potential Technique to Reduce Suicide Risk

As suicide is the nineteenth leading cause of death worldwide, it is important to focus on discovering ways to reduce the risk of suicide-related death as much as possible. With CRISPR starting to become increasingly popular over the past few years, this gene editing technique has been used to study how to edit, turn off, or knock out multiple parts of the genome. However, research on genes related to diseases as cystic fibrosis or Alzheimer’s disease has been mainly prioritized and, even though they are of high importance as well, important issues such as suicide have been left into oblivion. Four genes have been proven to be key in influencing suicide risk, showing that not only environmental factors account for an increased possibility of death by this cause. Therefore, gene editing techniques such as CRISPR could be applied in order to knock out those genes and reduce this risk. This research used Synthego’s guide RNA design tool to predict how the use of CRISPR can be helpful in knocking out those four suicide-related genes and, consequently, in preventing suicide. The top-ranked guide RNAs for each gene were used, showing the best results possible and with the least number of off-targets, which, in turn, demonstrates the effectiveness of CRISPR as a potential technique to reduce the number of suicide-related deaths worldwide.