CRISPR & DNA

Nobel Prize
Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences

• Physics
• Chemistry
• Medicine
• Literature
• Peace
• Economics

Chemistry, 2020
Emmanuelle Charpentier & Jennifer Doudna
"for the development of a method of genome editing"
CRISPR

• clustered
• regularly
• interspaced
• short
• palendromic
• repeats

Cas < CRISPR-associated
Cas9
tracrRNA
guide RNA

Charpentier et al., Nature (2011)
Charpentier, Doudna et al., Science (2012)

Structure of DNA

assumptions

• periodic table of the elements
• existence of atoms
• selection (Darwin) + inheritance/genetics
  • Gregor Mendel (1822-1884), "Versuche über Pflanzen-Hybriden," Verhandlungen des naturforschenden Vereines in Brün 4 (1866): 3-47.
  • Thomas Hunt Morgan (1866-1945), The Mechanism of Mendelian Heredity (1915)
    • Drosophila melanogaster
    • chromosomes
• Röntgen x-rays (1896) << Crookes tube

goals / project: the biochemical basis of inheritance (molecular biology)

• structure of DNA (deoxyribonucleic acid)
• mechanism of DNA replication during cell division
• how DNA controls the structure of proteins made by cells

X-Ray crystallography
Bragg (1862-1942) & Bragg (1890-1971)

nλ = 2d sinθ

University of Chicago - 1953
Harold Urey (1883-1981) & Stanley Miller (1930-2007)

Cavendish Laboratory (King's College, London) - 1952

• Rosalind Franklin & Raymond Gosling
  
• Maurice Wilkins, A.R. Stokes, & H.R. Wilson
  
• James Watson & Francis Crick (Cambridge)
  • Watson & Crick model
  • James Watson, The Double Helix

1958 - Matthew Meselson & Franklin Stahl

1990-2003 - Human Genome Project

mitocondrial DNA (mtDNA) - female
Y-chromosome (NRY) - male

map - Haplogroups