CRISPR and other matters

(22 Feb 2022)

I decided to read more of the production of Walter Isaacson as he recently published his book “The Code Breaker”, which tells the story about the rather recent Nobel price winner Jennifer Doudna. Her work is related to the development of the new tools for gene editing. I find the story rather exciting as it starts from an unexcepted place and has many exciting turns. Quite curiously it begins from a researcher who studied the DNA of bacteria in salt ponds (in Italy if I remember right). He unexpectedly found that the DNA of the bacteria contained regularly repeating code snippets (clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats = CRISPR). After a while he was able to compare the snippets with the DNA of viruses and found out that they closely matched. This later led to the understanding that bacteria can protect themselves from viruses via adopting the snippets (adopting their DNA). Furthermore, understanding this mechanisms consequently led to the development of tools which can modify DNA in a much more flexible way than previously. As you perhaps know, these CRISPR-related tools are often considered to be among the biggest scientific achievements lately. I find it inspiring how the seemingly rather obscure finding of a single bacteria researcher led to the world-changing development! A great success for basic research.