Rewriting the code of life
This year's Nobel Prize in Chemistry has created history by honouring an all-women team. The Nobel prize in Chemistry for 2020 is bagged by Jennifer A. Doudna and Emmanuelle Charpentier , who pioneered the revolutionary CRISPR-Cas9 gene editing technology. This technology was first developed in the year 2012. CRISPR (short for Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats) works like a genetic cut-and-paste tool that allows researchers to permanently modify genes in living cells. One of the best parts of CRISPR is its ease-of-use and is affordable. What is genome? Genome is a language which describes how tall you should be, what color of hair you should have, what color of eyes you should have. They act as instruction manual for synthesis of proteins. There is a particular gene sequence for everything, which determines our traits. How did researchers get to know about CRISPR-Cas9? Had someone dreamt about it? No. A particular form of bacteria, with an immune sys...