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Korean scientists built gene scissors that place DNA damage exactly where they want it

Every human cell suffers tens of thousands of tiny DNA injuries a day, and the repair crews that fix them are central to understanding cancer and ageing. The trouble: studying a repair crew meant first building an entire damaged DNA strand by hand — slow, costly, and rebuilt from scratch for every new question. A team led by Professor Lee Ja-yil at the Ulsan National Institute of Science and Technology (UNIST) has built CGRID, a tool that uses two single-strand-cutting gene scissors to lift out a short DNA segment and slot in a synthetic piece carrying exactly the damage researchers want to study. Because a guide molecule chooses the spot, the damage can be moved without redesigning everything. The work was published on October 28 in Nucleic Acids Research.

The upbeat factorto learn how the body heals its own code, scientists first had to wound it precisely — now they can, at will.
✓ Verified · Seoul Economic Daily · 2026-10-29 · South Korea
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