A bacterial immune system became the most precise gene-editing tool ever built

Bacteria use CRISPR-Cas9 to cut up the DNA of invading viruses. In 2012, Jennifer Doudna and Emmanuelle Charpentier showed the same system could be reprogrammed to cut any DNA sequence at a chosen spot, turning a bacterial defence mechanism into an editable 'find and replace' for genomes. They shared the 2020 Nobel Prize in Chemistry, the first all-female team to do so.

— Martin Jinek, Jennifer Doudna, Emmanuelle Charpentier et al., A Programmable Dual-RNA-Guided DNA Endonuclease in Adaptive Bacterial Immunity — Science, 2012; Nobel Prize in Chemistry, 2020
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