Researchers unveiled new gene‑editing approaches that repurpose bacterial retrons—reverse transcriptase-based elements that produce multicopy single‑stranded DNA—for precise and scalable genome edits. One report described engineering retrons to correct large genomic stretches, addressing conditions with heterogeneous mutational profiles, while a Nature Biotechnology paper identified retron reverse transcriptases from a metagenomic screen to expand precise editing toolkits. Retrons generate donor DNA inside cells through self-primed reverse transcription; repurposing them avoids delivering exogenous repair templates and could enable multiplexed or large-template edits. Teams behind the studies highlighted applications for complex genetic diseases and positioned retron-derived editors as complementary to CRISPR nucleases and base editors.