Jennifer Doudna

American biochemist Jennifer Doudna was awarded a Nobel Prize in 2020 along with French microbiologist Emmanuelle Charpentier for their development of CRISPR (clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats). CRISPR is a technology which can be used to edit genes. It works by the action of a protein called Cas9 which can slice mutated DNA. The CRISPR Cas9 system has the ability to recognise a particular DNA sequence. Cas9 locates the DNA sequence of interest by attaching to an RNA sequence that matches the DNA sequence desired to be edited. After the mutated DNA is cut, the correct version of the gene can be substituted in for the cell to work. This technique can be used in human therapeutics to agricultural applications, and is widely celebrated as having profoundly changed biomedical research.