After the announcement of the medicine prize and physics prize, the 2020 Nobel Prize in Chemistry was awarded to Emmanuelle Charpentier and Jennifer A. Doudna for the development of the CRISPR/Cas9 method of genetic editing. We discussed the origins, development, and applications of the CRISPR/Cas9 method earlier this year, but in light of this recent award, I thought we could delve a little deeper into the discovery and implications of this technology. Given how significant and ubiquitous the CRISPR/Cas9 technology has become, it was only a matter of time before it garnered a Nobel prize, but there was some disagreement…
Comments closedTag: Bacteriophages
The last few weeks, we’ve talked a lot about the immune system and how it builds and maintains immunity to viral pathogens, like Covid-19. This week, I’d like to shift a bit to a different form of immunity that doesn’t have anything to do with the coronavirus (I know, a blog post that’s not about Covid-19—shocking) but one that has had major implications in the field of genetic engineering: bacterial immunity to viral infection. I mentioned briefly in my post about viruses that a large subset of viruses infect bacteria, called bacteriophages. Although bacteria are far less complex than humans are, they…
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We’ve talked a lot about Covid-19 the past couple weeks — what type of virus it is and how it spreads. What I haven’t touched on yet is what viruses actually are and how they work. Virus is a broad category referring to genetic material (DNA or RNA) encased in a protein shell. Viruses don’t contain any cellular machinery of their own and therefore cannot replicate themselves nor their genetic material. Instead, they inject their genetic material into a cell and hijack the cell’s machinery to construct copies of the virus. This process can end with complete cell lysis (breaking open…
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