CRISPR Clustered Regularly Interspaced Palindromic Repeats

Wow (wow is a palindrome), two posts in two days.

Paul Anderson, an MS in science ed, says, "Like most things in molecular biology, Crispr was first identified in E Coli."

That's a nice sentence if either part of it is true.  Leave aside the "most things" generalization since I don't want to spend a month compiling examples that support or refute Paul. Leave aside the other for now, too, since I'm feeling overwhelmed by the idea of writing intelligently about Crispr.  Later I hunted down info about Japanese scientist Ishino who in 1987 sequenced what would later be called Crispr, in E coli. That's just where we wanted him to find it.  He did this as a postdoc at Yale, without giving us much info on either God or man there, since Buckley had already covered that.  "Gut bacteria sequences at Yale."   Catchy.

Crispr is a much easier system for editing genes than the clunky systems we have had.  It takes out a given chunk, not a given clunk, and may replace it with another chunk.  Like the chunk causing sickle cell anemia or cystic fibrosis or some kind of congenital blindness.  We have had a number of gene changing systems, but they were expensive and not very accurate.  Crispr seems to have dodged around both of those hurdles.  Though how much medical research or treatment can dodge around being expensive remains to be seen.

A palindrome is something that is the same backwards and forwards, like ABBA or Morrom (but not Morrom Church) or 374,473 or rigir or foof.  Taco cat.  Stressed desserts.  The repeating piece of DNA has base pairs that read the same backward and forward  caat g taac

So these sequences are repeated a number of times.  Between them are nonrepeating DNA segments.  This "between" stuff creates the "regularly interspaced."  You put a number of these together and you have a cluster.

Repeated short sequences of nucleotides (protein pieces) interspersed at regular intervals between unique sequences of nucleotides derived from the DNA of pathogens (such as viruses) which had previously infected the bacteria and that functions to protect the bacteria against future infection by the same pathogens

 

OHSU  Casey Eye  Mark Pennesi Leper 10 trial Mar 20 to last one year