Diagnostics Diagnostics
CRISPR-
hen Francisco Mojica, a research scientist at the University of Alicante, Spain, set out to study genetic repeats in bacterial organisms, he had no idea his research would set the pace for discoveries that would have a profound impact in the fields of diagnostics and genetic engineering. The big discovery came in the early ’90s when Mojica first noticed the repetitive sequences, which he later named “short regularly spaced repeats” or SRSRs, while studying Haloferax mediterranei, a type of archaea found in salt flats.
W 8
based detection
The discovery of CRISPR was a pivotal moment in the fi eld of genetic engineering, due to the ability to use it to enable site-specifi c editing of DNA. It’s been a decade since CRISPR was discovered and this particular application still hasn’t made it out of clinical trials and into the clinic. But that doesn’t mean the tool doesn’t have its uses, as we discovered when a plethora of CRISPR-based Covid-19 tests hit the market during the pandemic. Covid-19 is just a single use case for CRISPR in diagnostics, however, and Oladimeji Ewumi speaks to Bryan Dechario, CEO of Sherlock Biosciences, and Kevin Davies, executive editor of The CRISPR Journal, to learn how the genetic engineering tool is being used to develop improved testing protocols for diseases.
In 2001, after a decade of research that found similar sequences across a plethora of bacteria and archaea, Mojica and another researcher coined the term “CRISPR,” which stands for clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats. The goal was to unify further research using a consistent terminology, as a research group led by another scientist, Ruud Jansen was using SPacers Interspersed Direct Repeats (SPIDR) to describe the same phenomenon. The naming convention was agreed, but neither group had a firm grasp on the significance of their findings.
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