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CRISPR Biology and Biotechnology: the Future of Genome Editing
Jennifer A. Doudna, University of California, Berkeley; Howard Hughes Medical Institute
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Programmable proteins that detect and cut specific DNA sequences were uncovered by research to understand how bacteria fight viral infections. In collaboration with Emmanuelle Charpentier’s laboratory, we determined how the enzyme Cas9, which is part of CRISPR-Cas adaptive bacterial immunity, can be harnessed as a powerful technology to alter genomic sequences in cells. This created a simple, precise and widely adaptable technology for genome editing – changing or regulating the genetic material – in any cell or organism. Current research is exploring the diversity of CRISPR-Cas systems in microbes and developing genome editing for biomedical and agricultural applications. I will also discuss the ethical and societal implications of genome editing.
About Jennifer A. Doudna
As an internationally renowned professor of Chemistry and Molecular and Cell Biology at U.C. Berkeley, Doudna and her colleagues rocked the research world in 2012 by describing a simple way of editing the DNA of any organism using an RNA-guided protein found in bacteria. This technology, called CRISPR-Cas9, has opened the floodgates of possibility for human and non-human applications of gene editing, including assisting researchers in the fight against HIV, sickle cell disease and muscular dystrophy. Doudna is an Investigator with the Howard Hughes Medical Institute and a member of the National Academy of Sciences, the National Academy of Medicine, the National Academy of Inventors and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. She is also a Foreign Member of the Royal Society, and has received many other honors including the Breakthrough Prize in Life Sciences, the Heineken Prize, the BBVA Foundation Frontiers of Knowledge Award and the Japan Prize. She is the co-author with Sam Sternberg of “A Crack in Creation”, a personal account of her research and the societal and ethical implications of gene editing.
Audience: Public
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