crispr

Jennifer Doudna and Emmanuelle Charpentier win the Nobel Prize in Chemistry 2020. 1) Press release from the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences. As so often in science, the discovery of these genetic scissors was unexpected. During Emmanuelle Charpentier’s studies of Streptococcus pyogenes, one of the bacteria that cause the most harm to humanity, she discovered a previously unknown molecule, tracrRNA. Her work showed that tracrRNA is part of bacteria’s ancient immune system, CRISPR/Cas, that disarms viruses by cleaving their DNA. 2) Recent update on the status of the patent dispute with the Broad