L ike its incredible applications, CRISPR too has a storied past. The CRISPR gene was first discovered by Yoshizumi Ishino in 1987 during his study of the E. coli gene iap( inhibitor of apoptosis- programmed cell death), who noted the unusual spacing of sequences but gave little insight to its significance. In 2002, Ruud Jansen and Francisco Mojica identified a common sequence at the end of the genetic chains of multiple organisms, but also discovered a unique spacing varying between each one. They coined the term Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats, or CRISPR. They hypothesized that the sequences were most likely associated with gene repair, but in 2006, the CRISPR gene was proven instead to be part of a bacterial immune system. These discoveries laid the foundation for one of the most revolutionary breakthroughs in modern genetic engineering.
But involving recent CRISPR research, one of the most famous and influential names is Jennifer Doudna, making arguably the most significant contributions to CRISPR research. She discovered that CRISPR used the nuclease( gene-cutter) Cas9, but in the process, developed a method to manipulate the gene for genome editing. This discovery alone allows the alteration of genes with minimal effort, creating a method for far more efficient and accurate genetic research.“ It’ s like a dream come true for me as a biologist” says Craig Mello, a researcher from the University of Massachusetts who earned a Nobel Prize in Medicine during 2006 commenting on his use of this new technique in his studies.
Dr. Doudna’ s inspiration for her research began in Hilo, Hawaii, where she attended Hilo High School and grew up with a great love for exploring the outdoors and an overwhelming passion for her chemistry and biology classes, she began to discover her future career.“ No one in my family was drawn to science, but I was really intrigued by figuring out how the world works by doing experiments,” she said. In her junior year, her high school sponsored a program which broughts scientists from around the country to speak with the students. Although with a myriad of fields, with geologists laying out their research to astronomers sharing their knowledge of the vast galaxies, something else caught her attention: A speaker from the cancer center at the University of Hawaii presenting her work relating to molecular processes.
“ I was so fascinated by her work,” Dr. Doudna said. She wanted to be just like her, and so she set off on her journey to become a molecular biologist. She attended Pomona College in California, majoring in biochemistry, and moved for graduate school at Harvard. Guided by sheer curiosity, she researched RNA structures and was credited with solving the crystal structure Tetrahymena Group I ribozyme in 1991, the 2nd solved RNA structure since tRNA. This alone was a great scientific breakthrough. Moving to Yale and then Berkeley in 2002, Doudna continued to study this RNA and find further evidence to support her research. However, during 2005, she was approached by Jillian Banfield, a geomicrobiologist at Berkeley who was studying microbes in an abandoned mine. He explained that many of these organisms had unusual CRISPR sequences, leading to Doudna’ s shift to focusing on CRISPR research. Today, at the age of 52, she has not lost any of her scientific passion and continues her research, teaching as a professor in the departments of Molecular and Cell Biology and Chemistry at UC Berkeley. She runs her own lab at Berkeley and hopes to inspire the next generation of great discovery and innovation through her revolutionary work with CRISPR-Cas9, coming full circle from a girl from Hilo, Hawaii inspired by science to a living legacy laying the path for genetic engineering and the future to come.
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