Login With Google
2020 Nobel Prize for Chemistry
Why is it in News?
- Emmanuelle Charpentier, Jennifer Doudna share Nobel Prize for scissors to edit genes.
Details:
- Discovery:
(1) The CRISPR stands for Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats.
(2) It is the technology for gene-editing which first developed in 2012.
(3) Though gene editing or modifying gene sequences is not new, CRISPR has made it easy and more efficient.
- How it works?
(1) Technology locates the specific area in the genetic sequence which has been diagnosed to be the cause of the problem.
(2) It cuts it out, and replaces it with a new and correct sequence that no longer causes the problem.
(3) An RNA molecule is programmed to locate the particular problematic sequence on the DNA strand.
(4) A special protein called Cas9, genetic scissor, is used to break and remove the problematic sequence.
(5) A DNA strand, when broken, has a natural tendency to repair itself.
(6) But the auto-repair mechanism can lead to the re-growth of a problematic sequence.
(7) Scientists intervene during this auto-repair process by supplying the desired sequence of genetic codes, which replaces the original sequence.
(8) Because the entire process is programmable, it has a remarkable efficiency.