Skoltech researchers Anastasiia Kirillova and Ilya Mazunin have published a paper “Operation “mitochondrial wipeout” — clearing recipient mitochondria DNA during the cytoplasmic replacement therapy” in Journal of Assisted Reproduction and Genetics. The authors discuss a promising direction in mitochondrial diseases treatment via “mitochondrial wipeout”. The most perspective experiments on mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) clearing were performed by using site-specific nucleases targeting one of the mtDNA haplotypes. The authors emphasize that cleavage of pathogenic mtDNA is not considered as “true” genome editing. For “true” mtDNA editing, there are several generations of cytosine base editors which do not require the cleavage of one of the mtDNA variants. The limitation on ubiquitous use of these systems is their inability to edit any types of mtDNA mutations. Full text of the paper is available here.