In a few hours so proclaimed whom receiving the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. Our medical reporter Annika Östman strongest candidates for a discovery that has been made in Umeå.
The discovery is perhaps closer to you than you think, for example in a plate of file or yogurt. There is namely the good bacteria that fascinated the researcher Emmanuelle Charpentier.
In Umeå few years ago she had time to unconditionally try to understand how the bacteria works. Their worst enemy is actually the virus.
The bacteria have created a defense system. In the genome, it looks like repeated five long and in between short pieces.
This brilliant defense system crispr serves as the bacteria takes pictures of crime suspects enemies, in profile and from the front. Then the bacteria with the image at the ready to recognize a virus which once again proved nearby. Then sent an enzyme out, CAS 9, which like a Swiss knife cut apart and destroy the virus.
defense system with the memory and the knife, called crispr / Cas9, clustered Regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats, managed Frenchwoman Emmanuelle Charpentier in Umeå map and get stable with American Jennifer Doudna in California.
Without knowing it, they created thereby also an extremely effective and inexpensive tool to cut apart the genes with any of plants, animals and humans. It can be likened to a kind of knife molecules have, according to many, has led to the largest change in genetic engineering since the 1970s, but also to much debate.
This genkniven can probably be used to cure genetic diseases but also alter the human genome forever.
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