Who owns CRISPR? - An update on the Interference.

Editor's Notes

• #4: BTW, bacteria (and archea) are called prokaryotes. Animals and plants are called eukaryotes. This will be important later. CRIPSR is a gene editing technology that, in some circumstances, can cut DNA more accurately and at lower cost than previous techniques. It’s the hottest thing since slices mRNA. Cutting DNA lets you “knock-out” a gene (the gene will stop doing what it normally does) or “knock-in” another gene (so the cell starts doing something else). For example, you could manipulate a mouse genome to express genes that mimic a human disease for study. To do any kind of editing (think Microsoft WORD) you need to be able to find you place on the genome and cut it to remove a gene or insert a new piece of genetic material. The scisors are called nucleases. The human genome has 3 billion base pairs (think 3 billion letters in a document). The mouse genome has about the same (2.7 billion). War and Peace has 587,000 words or roughly 3 million letters. So the genome has about a thousand times the number of letters. If you were a super-Tolstoy, and you wanted to add a few sentences at a particular point in Word you would type in a few words you know and do a “find”. To cut the geneome, the nuclease needs to do a “find.” In the past, nucleases were made to target a particular sequence of genome “letters.” So you had one nulease that looked for and cut the sequence. For example, one nuclease cut wherever it found the sequence GAATTC. What I
• #5: BTW, bacteria (and archea) are called prokaryotes. Animals and plants are called eukaryotes. This will be important later. CRIPSR is a gene editing technology that, in some circumstances, can cut DNA more accurately and at lower cost than previous techniques. It’s the hottest thing since slices mRNA. Cutting DNA lets you “knock-out” a gene (the gene will stop doing what it normally does) or “knock-in” another gene (so the cell starts doing something else). For example, you could manipulate a mouse genome to express genes that mimic a human disease for study. To do any kind of editing (think Microsoft WORD) you need to be able to find you place on the genome and cut it to remove a gene or insert a new piece of genetic material. The scisors are called nucleases. The human genome has 3 billion base pairs (think 3 billion letters in a document). The mouse genome has about the same (2.7 billion). War and Peace has 587,000 words or roughly 3 million letters. So the genome has about a thousand times the number of letters. If you were a super-Tolstoy, and you wanted to add a few sentences at a particular point in Word you would type in a few words you know and do a “find”. To cut the geneome, the nuclease needs to do a “find.” In the past, nucleases were made to target a particular sequence of genome “letters.” So you had one nulease that looked for and cut the sequence. For example, one nuclease cut wherever it found the sequence GAATTC.
• #6: Cas9 (CRISPR associated protein 9) is an RNA-guided DNA endonuclease enzyme associated with the CRISPR (Clustered Regularly Interspersed Palindromic Repeats) adaptive immunity system in Streptococcus pyogenes, among other bacteria. S. pyogenes utilizes Cas9 to memorize[1] and later interrogate and cleave foreign DNA,[2] such as invading bacteriophage DNA or plasmid DNA. Cas9 performs this interrogation by unwinding foreign DNA and checking whether it is complementary to the 20 basepair spacer region of the guide RNA. If the DNA substrate is complementary to the guide RNA, Cas9 cleaves the invading DNA. In this sense, the CRISPR-Cas9 mechanism has a number of parallels with the RNA interference (RNAi) mechanism in eukaryotes.
• #7: BTW, bacteria (and archea) are called prokaryotes. Animals and plants are called eukaryotes. This will be important later. CRIPSR is a gene editing technology that, in some circumstances, can cut DNA more accurately and at lower cost than previous techniques. It’s the hottest thing since slices mRNA. Cutting DNA lets you “knock-out” a gene (the gene will stop doing what it normally does) or “knock-in” another gene (so the cell starts doing something else). For example, you could manipulate a mouse genome to express genes that mimic a human disease for study. To do any kind of editing (think Microsoft WORD) you need to be able to find you place on the genome and cut it to remove a gene or insert a new piece of genetic material. The scisors are called nucleases. The human genome has 3 billion base pairs (think 3 billion letters in a document). The mouse genome has about the same (2.7 billion). War and Peace has 587,000 words or roughly 3 million letters. So the genome has about a thousand times the number of letters. If you were a super-Tolstoy, and you wanted to add a few sentences at a particular point in Word you would type in a few words you know and do a “find”. To cut the geneome, the nuclease needs to do a “find.” In the past, nucleases were made to target a particular sequence of genome “letters.” So you had one nulease that looked for and cut the sequence. For example, one nuclease cut wherever it found the sequence GAATTC.
• #8: Junior and Senior Parties. 7 month priority to Doudna. Application still pending Zhang fast-tracked his application. So far
• #9: Junior and Senior Parties. 7 month priority to Doudna. Application still pending Zhang fast-tracked his application. So far
• #10: Will be a thing of the past with changes to the US patent laws. Conception and reduction to practice.