  Genome editing allows scientists to change an organism's DNA. One promising
genome editing protocol, already validated in living organisms, is based on
clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats (CRISPR)/Cas
protein-nucleic acid complexes. When the CRISPR/Cas approach was first
demonstrated in 2012, its advantages with respect to previously available
techniques, such as zinc-finger nucleases (ZFNs) and transcription
activator-like effector nucleases (TALENs), immediately got attention and the
method has seen a surge of experimental and computational investigations since
then. However, the molecular mechanisms involved in target DNA recognition and
cleavage are still not completely resolved and need further attention. The
large size and complex nature of CRISPR/Cas9 complexes has been a challenge for
computational studies, but some seed results exist and are illuminating on the
cleavage activity. In this short review, we present recent progress in studying
CRISPR/Cas9 systems by molecular dynamics simulations with coarse-grained and
atomistic descriptions, including enhanced sampling.
