Fig. 3.

Major application areas of CRISPR-Cas-based technologies beyond genome editing. While WT Cas9 enables genome editing through its guidable DNA cleavage activity, catalytically impaired Cas9 enzymes have been repurposed to achieve targeted gene regulation, epigenome editing, chromatin imaging, and chromatin topology manipulations. Furthermore, the catalytically impaired nickase Cas9 enzyme has been used as a platform for base editing without double strand breaks. In addition to DNA-targeting Cas proteins, novel RNA-targeting CRISPR/Cas systems have been described as well