NgAgo

NgAgo is a single-stranded DNA-guided Argonaute endonuclease derived from the bacterium Natronobacterium gregoryi, proposed in May 2016 by Chunyu Han and colleagues and published in Nature Biotechnology as a genome-editing tool. Its developers claimed it could edit genes with high accuracy and efficiency without requiring the protospacer adjacent motif that CRISPR/Cas9 systems need, which would have made it a notable alternative editing technology. Multiple other research groups were unable to reproduce the results, and the original authors retracted the study in August 2017; a 2018 university investigation found the team had not intentionally deceived the scientific community even though their findings were flawed, and a 2019 preprint suggested the earlier failures might have stemmed from difficulties purifying the protein rather than a fundamental flaw in the underlying concept, leaving NgAgo's real capability unresolved.