Researchers engineered a CRISPR system designed to selectively trigger cancer cell death by “chromatin shredding” through recognition of mutant p53 mRNA, according to a new Nature study led by Jingkun Zeng and collaborators from the Innovative Genomics Institute (IGI), UC Berkeley, UCSF, and the Gladstone Institutes. The approach uses CRISPR-Cas12a2 to distinguish healthy versus disease cells differing by a single nucleotide.