The Nobel Prize in Chemistry 2020 was jointly awarded to French microbiologist, Emmanuelle Charpentier, and American Biochemist, Jennifer A. Doudna, “for the development of a method for genome editing”. They have discovered one of gene technology’s sharpest tools the CRISPR / Cas 9 “genetic scissors”.
The CRISPR (Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats) technology works in a simple way – it locates the specific area of gene sequence which causes the problem, cuts it out, and replaces it with a new correct sequence that no longer causes the problem. It was discovered in 2012 and has been widely used by researchers in various fields. They can change the DNA (Deoxyribonucleic Acid) of animals, plants, and microorganisms with extremely high precision.
DNA is the material that carries all the information about the biological makeup of a living being. Each piece of information is carried on different sections which are called genes. An organism’s complete set of DNA is called its genome.
