CRISPR’s Nobel Prize honors two great scientists and excludes many others

Featured images: 2015 US Emmanuelle Charpentier (left) and Jennifer Doudna.Photo: Reuters / Eloy Alonso

Gene editing technology CRISPR won the 2020 Nobel Prize in Chemistry.. The recognition of this amazing breakthrough technology is not surprising.

However, each Nobel Prize can be awarded to 3 people or lessAnd that’s where this year’s awards are really interesting.

Decision to award a prize Jennifer Doudna And Emmanuelle Charpentier Geopolitics and patent law are related, comparing basic science and applied science.

Edit the letter of the Book of Life

CRISPR is a powerful gene editing tool that incorporates molecular biology from the typewriter to the word processor era. It’s like Microsoft Word for life books. CRISPR allows researchers to find not only genes, but also very specific parts of a gene, modify it, delete it, or add a completely foreign gene. Genetic modification, which took years in a sophisticated biological laboratory, is now in days. Significantly less cost..

The story of CRISPR began in 1987 by molecular biologists Yoshizumi Ishino And his colleague discovered a strange palindromic DNA spread. E. coli, A commonly studied gastric bacterium.No one could imagine What purpose it served..

By 2002, DNA sequencing methods became cheaper and more common, and researchers found Ishino repeats in nearly half of all bacteria and most of the sequenced unicellular archaea.At this point there were enough puzzle pieces Francisco Modica With the University of Alicante Ludo Janssen I came up with a great acronym at Utrecht University: CRISPR – clustered, regularly spaced short palindromic iterations.

Almost five years later, at the National Biotechnology Information Center in Bethesda, Maryland, Eugene Koonin Established strange DNA function Bacterial defense system consisting of two parts.. The first is a stretch of DNA that acts as an album of defeated enemies. When the bacteria defeat the enemy, they cut out some of the genetic material of the defeated invader and put it in the album. Mugshots of these genes are separated by repeated stretches of DNA that read the same anterior or posterior. These palindromic bits of DNA are the PR of CRISPR.

The second component of the bacterial defense system is the weapon of search and destruction. Each gene mugshot is associated with a search and disruption protein called a CRISPR-related (Cas) protein. These Cas proteins circulate intracellularly and kill invaders when they encounter a set of genetic material that corresponds to a gene’s mugshot target.

It took 20 years and much research to discover and understand these proteins.

Then, in 2007, Danish food and beverage company Danisco confirmed Koonin’s hypothesis that CRISPR is a bacterial defense system. Today, most yogurt and cheese makers incorporate CRISPR sequences into their cultures to protect their products from common viral outbreaks. According to Rodolphe Barrangou“If you’ve ever eaten yogurt or cheese, you may have eaten CRISPR-ized cells,” said Danisco USA.

Leverage the potential of CRISPR

Jennifer Doudna, a biochemist with extensive experience working with RNA at the University of California, Berkeley, began using CRISPR in 2006. At a conference of the American Society of Microbiology in San Juan, Puerto Rico in 2011, she worked on a specific CRISPR-related protein called Cas9 at Umeå’s Swedish Institute for Molecular Infectious Medicine.

Doudna and Charpentier had complementary skills. While roaming the old town of San Juan, Charpentier convinced Doudna that Cas9 was responsible for finding and cleaving the DNA sequence that corresponds to the mugshot. Doudna was intrigued and The role played by Cas9..

Charpentier at Cas9 Streptococcus pyogenes, Bacteria that cause streptococcal pharyngitis and carnivorous diseases. Instead of sending these dangerous bacteria to Doudna, she sent her the DNA encoding CRISPR-Cas9 all night. The more Doudna studied Charpentier’s molecular scissors, the more it became clear to her that this bacterial system could be adopted to edit DNA. She was right, so with a few tweaks, she converted CRISPR-Cas9 into a gene editing tool. Doudna is a memoir, CRISPR-Cas9 “It was a perfect bacterial weapon: A virus-searching missile that can attack quickly and with incredible accuracy. “

Doudna and her collaborators wrote the results and submitted the manuscript to Science. Science magazine quickly tracked the paper and published it a few days after submission. Around the same time, she applied for a patent for the CRISPR-Cas9 gene editing system.

in the meantime, Virginijus SiksnysA molecular biologist at Vilnius University in Lithuania, he also foresaw the potential of the CRISPR system, which has a research background in a class of proteins that cleave DNA called restriction endonucleases. He submitted his results to the journal Cell. The editor rejected the manuscript without sending it for review. Siksnys confident in his work and its importance, his manuscript Minutes of the National Academy of Sciences.. This paper was sent before Doudna’s paper was published, but due to some amendments, it was published three months after Doudna’s paper was published.

Like Doudna and Sixney, Feng ZhangA professor of neuroscience at MIT used the CRISPR-Cas9 system to edit DNA. However, Zhang used CRISPR-Cas9 to slice and dice DNA in human cells while others did all the editing in the solution. In January 2013, Zhang announced himself Scientific paper.. At that time, Doudna had applied for a patent seven months ago, but Feng Zhang asked his employers, MIT and the Broad Institute of MIT,: Apply for a patent on his behalf..

Broad Institute lawyers knew that Doudna’s allegations were pending and paid an additional fee to accelerate patent applications. It worked and they were granted the CRISPR-Cas9 patent before Doudna was finally awarded to her. This started a carefully watched court battle.The contest isn’t over yet, but Doudna seems to be winning Court struggle in the EU And Zhang of the United States..

Politics over awards

The decision to award the Nobel Prize to Doudna and Charpentier has never been easier. By choosing these two over Feng Zhang, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences sent a big message. It was possible to award a third researcher, but that was not the case. Was it a statement targeting the legal system?

Fortunately, scientists using CRISPR as their molecular editor are unaffected by the legal battle.They have a CRISPR system Addgene Open source repository. Clinical applications of CRISPR, such as finding treatments for genetic diseases such as cystic fibrosis and sickle cell anemia, are technical issues and are most likely to be affected by legal controversy. Most commercial use..

In many cases, basic science research goes nowhere. Often it goes in an unexpected direction. Sometimes it leads to the most exciting and wonderful conclusions. CRISPR-Cas9 is one of these cases. It started with a strangely repeated palindrome, matured through mozzarella cheese and yogurt, and finally blossomed into the 2020 Nobel Prize-winning contested gene editing tool.

This article has been updated to include Francisco Mojica and Ruud Jansen in the description of early CRISPR studies.

Marc Zimmer is a professor of chemistry at the University of Connecticut.

This article will be republished from conversation Under a Creative Commons license.Read Original work..