Drs. Jennifer Doudna and Emmanuelle Charpentier recently won the Nobel Prize for Chemistry for discovering CRISPR. Below are highlights from Dr. Doudna’s recent interview with Future Human about what’s next for the technology, including regulations and amazing applications.
Remind me—what’s CRISPR? It’s gene editing technology that allows scientists to make small, precise edits to an organism’s own genome.
If you want to get more technical about it… “Short for clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats, CRISPR is actually a naturally occurring bacterial immune system. When viruses attack bacteria, bacteria in turn grab snippets of genetic material from their viral invaders and incorporate these bits into their own DNA. This helps bacteria recognize viruses later on and thwart future invaders. Bacteria do this by producing an RNA molecule that acts as a guide, which cuts up the viral genome,” says Future Human.
Agriculture is “likely to be the area where we’ll see a broader impact in the near term,” she said, on things like “making plants that have genetic changes that can enable things like better crop yield, resistance to drought, higher levels of nutritional value."
And it could revolutionize health diagnostics. Dr. Doudna’s company Mammoth Biosciences (BIO member!) is working on a rapid CRISPR-based COVID-19 test, which it’s “rolling out…to a few partner labs for initial beta testing in November,” she added.
Geeking out over CRISPR?Read the whole interview.
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