The Nobel Prize in Chemistry 2020: Celebrating the collaborative efforts leading to a tool (CRISPR-Cas) for rewriting a code of life

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