Emmanuelle Charpentier & Jennifer Doudna Receive Nobel Prize in Chemistry
In an historic moment, two women, a Parisian professor Dr. Emmanuelle Chapentier and an American biochemist Dr. Jennifer Anne Doudna received a joint award for the Nobel Prize in Chemistry this Wednesday, October 7th, 2020 for their work on Crispr-Cas9.
Crispr-Cas9 is a tool that can modify a targeted molecule of DNA in settings of both in vitro using a dish or a test tube, and with live cells too using single-guide RNAs. Over the past several years, UC, the University of Vienna, and Emmanuella Charpentier alongside Jennifer A. Doudna fought several legal battles to gain co-ownership of the multiple patents related to the Crispr DNA modification tool. Together, the two women have won numerous awards for their work with Crispr since 2012 when the tool’s technology was first commercialized. Now, only eight years after co-publishing their first paper on Crispr-Cas9, they have finally received an international recognition with the Nobel Prize in Chemistry.
Charpentier and Doudna are only the sixth and seventh women to ever receive a Nobel for chemistry. Their gene-customizing tool allows modification in the DNA cells of animals, plants, microbes, and even humans.
After receiving the award, Dr. Doudna who is a professor at the University of California Berkeley shared at a news conference, “I’m over the moon, I’m in shock.”
Meanwhile, Dr. Charpentier, the Director of the Max Planck Unit for the Science of Pathogens in Berlin, revealed about the Nobel reception, “It’s something you hear, but you don’t completely connect. I was very emotional.”
While working with her colleagues on Streptococcus pyogenes in 2006, the French professor-researcher discovered a series of repeating segments in the bacteria’s DNA. These were first discovered earlier in the 1980s and finally named by a Spanish microbiologist Dr. Francisco Mojica in 2000, calling them “Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats” or “Crispr”. His research found that the “repeats” held bits of genetic material from previous viruses that had tried to infect the bacteria microbe. The bacteria grabbed the bits and stored them as if to create an archive for future defense.
It was during her research that Dr. Charpentier discovered the steps taken by bacteria to use the bits for defending against future virus attacks. She then wrote a paper in 2011 and upon realising her need for further RNA expert collaboration, connected with Dr. Doudna. By the following year, they had co-published a paper on DNA alterations using RNA molecules.
The team at Media Quotient Inc. congratulates the two scientists on their breakthrough and the invention of a tool that can change the way DNA can be edited and repaired to even save embryos from later life-threatening mutations.
