Nobel prize 🏆 2020

  

The 2020 Nobel Prize in Chemistry has gone to Emmanuelle Charpentier and Jennifer A. Doudna “for the development of a method for genome editing.” That method, formally known as CRISPR-Cas9 gene editing but often called simply CRISPR, allows scientists to precisely cut any strand of DNA they wish. In the 8 years since its creation, CRISPR has been a boon for biologists, who have published thousands of studies showing that the tool can alter DNA in organisms across the tree of life, including butterflies, mushrooms, tomatoes, and even humans.

“The number of discoveries in biomedicine that have had the impact that Jennifer’s and Emmanuelle’s had can be counted on the fingers of one hand: recombinant DNA, PCR [polymerase chain reaction], DNA sequencing, and now CRISPR,” says Fyodor Urnov, a gene-editing scientist at the University of California, Berkeley. “We have never had a technology as powerful and versatile as genome editing with CRISPR.”

Charpentier, who is now at the Max Planck Unit for the Science of Pathogens, and Doudna, at UC Berkeley, began working together in 2011. The two scientists were inspired by a little-studied bacterial immune system that uses an enzyme called Cas9 to chop up the genes of invading viruses, which are saved as molecular mug shots. In 2011, Charpentier worked out the details of how a pair of bacterial RNA molecules controlled this process