![]() ![]() ![]() Rodolphe Barringou and Philippe Horvath, two French scientists who worked for the Danish food company Danisco, set to work on this. In the meantime, the international yogurt and cheese industry faced a problem: their starter cultures, (mostly bacteria), were attacked by viruses. It was he, too, who came up with the acronym. This was sterling work, carried out with very little funding. The first person to figure out the function of these repeated sequences was Francisco Mojica, who began working on the problem in 1990. This repeated series was first discovered in 1986 by Yoshizumi Ishino, but he didn’t know what to make of it and left the matter there. ![]() They evolved a defense system known as CRISPR (Clustered Regularly Interspaced Palindromic Repeats) which is, as the acronym indicates, a regular series of repeated bases in DNA. Humble bacteria had already solved that problem eons ago because they, just like every other living being on the planet, are attacked by viruses. The big question, quite obviously, was: how? The realization that genes play a role in many diseases quite naturally inspired the desire to manipulate these genes in order to treat or prevent the diseases involved. As the bearer of heredity, it carries the instructions for making proteins while the various forms of RNA are involved in actual synthesis of proteins. The discovery in 1953 that DNA is a double helix set off a cascade of research into this molecule. ![]()
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