Abstract:
The Nobel Prize in Chemistry 2020 has
been awarded to Emmanuelle Charpen-
tier, from the Max Planck Unit for the
Science of Pathogens, Berlin, Germany
and Jennifer A. Doudna, from University
of California, Berkeley, USA, for the
gene-editing technique known as the
CRISPR/Cas9 scissors 1 . For the first
time in history, the prize has been
awarded within nine years of the discovery
and the awardees are an all-female team
after Marie Curie (1911) and Dorothy
Crowfoot Hodgkin (1967), who are
single awardees of the Nobel Prize. No
doubt, this discovery has opened up new
horizons for therapeutic and biotechno-
logical applications.
The story of CRISPR/Cas reiterates
how research in basic science opens up
doors for innovations! A study on arms
race between the tiny bacteria and their
tiniest enemy, the viruses (Yes! the bac-
teria are attacked by viruses, commonly
called bacteriophages), has endowed a
lot to the world of science. The bacteria
have many elegant mechanisms to coun-
teract the invading viruses 2 . The
CRISPR-Cas system that stands for Clus-
tered Regularly Interspaced Short
Palindromic Repeats and the CRISPR
associated genes is one such
mechanism 3,4 . This system stores the
memories of the viral attacks as spacers,
equally sized signature sequences of the
viral genomes, within this CRISPR 3,4 .
These spacers are regularly interspaced
within the palindromic repeats 3,4