With the Nobel Prize in Chemistry going to Gene Editing tool CRISPR, the clock back again on research that could be a potential tool of research for this pandemic
The Nobel Prize in Chemistry has been awarded to the two scientists who transformed an obscure bacterial immune mechanism, commonly called CRISPR, into a tool that can simply and cheaply edit the genomes of everything from wheat to mosquitoes to humans, reports the Science Magazine.
The Next Rosalind Franklins
The award went jointly to Emmanuelle Charpentier of Max Planck Unit for the Science of Pathogens and Jennifer A. Doudna of the University of California, Berkeley, “for the development of a method for genome editing.”
They first showed that CRISPR–which stands for clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats—could edit DNA in an in vitro system, in a paper published in the 28 June 2012 Science.
How this discovery changed medicine, food, everything we know?
Their discovery was rapidly expanded on by many others and soon made CRISPR a common tool in labs around the world. The work spawned industries working on making new medicines, agricultural products, and ways to control pests.
Many anticipated that Feng Zhang of the Broad Institute, who showed 6 months later that CRISPR worked in mammalian cells, would share the prize.
The Fierce Patent Battle That Followed
The institutions of the three scientists are locked in a fierce patent battle over who deserves the intellectual property rights to CRISPR’s discovery, which some estimate could be worth billions of dollars.
How does it work?
Doudna and Charpentier—who is originally from France and at the time of the discovery worked at the University of Vienna–showed that they could program a small strip of what they called “guide RNA” to carry a CRISPR-associated (Cas) enzyme to exact DNA sequences, allowing them to target specific genes. Cas then cuts the double-stranded DNA. In many cases, the DNA repair mechanism of the cell makes errors, which can cripple a gene. CRISPR also allows researchers to insert a new stretch of DNA at the cut site.
CRISPR was also used in one of the controversial biomedical experiments of the past decade, when a Chinese scientist edited the genomes of human embryos, resulting in the birth of three babies with altered genes. He was widely condemned and eventually sentenced to jail in China, which has in other areas become a leader in CRISPR research.
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Source: Science
