40 Fun Facts About CRISPR

Which household tool did the 2020 Nobel committee liken CRISPR-Cas9 to when it announced the gene-editing prize?

Scissors is the image the Nobel committee used: it called CRISPR-Cas9 genetic scissors that snip DNA at a chosen spot. The cell then repairs the break, and that repair is where the gene gets rewritten.

Danisco scientists proved in 2007 that CRISPR shields bacteria from viruses while studying cultures for which food?

Yogurt production is often hit by viruses that kill the starter bacteria, so Danisco studied the survivors. They had copied pieces of the viruses' DNA into their own CRISPR arrays.

Twin girls born in China in 2018 had the CCR5 gene edited as embryos using CRISPR to resist which virus?

HIV uses the CCR5 protein as its doorway into cells, so the experiment tried to remove it. The work drew condemnation around the world, and the babies are known only by the pseudonyms Lulu and Nana.

Casgevy, the first approved CRISPR-based medicine, treats which inherited condition by editing blood stem cells?

Sickle cell disease bends red blood cells into rigid curves that block small vessels. The edited stem cells go back into the patient and make more fetal haemoglobin, which carries oxygen normally.

In which Dwayne Johnson film does weaponised CRISPR research mutate a gorilla, a wolf and a crocodile into monsters?

Rampage is loosely based on a 1986 arcade game about monsters smashing cities. On screen the gorilla George, the wolf Ralph and the crocodile Lizzie all converge on Chicago.

Harvard researchers used CRISPR to record a short film clip in the DNA of living bacteria; what did the clip show?

A galloping horse, photographed by Eadweard Muybridge in 1878, was stored as a GIF. The bacteria filed each frame in their CRISPR arrays in order, so reading the DNA back replayed the film.

Colossal Biosciences uses CRISPR to put ancient genes into Asian elephant cells, hoping to revive which extinct animal?

Woolly mammoth traits such as fatty tissue and blood that holds oxygen in the cold are the targets. The result would be a cold-hardy elephant hybrid, not a true copy of the Ice Age animal.

CRISPR has been used to disable 62 dormant viruses in the DNA of which animal, bred as an organ donor for humans?

Pig organs are about the right size for people, but viruses buried in the animal's DNA could infect a patient. In 2024 a man in Boston received a gene-edited kidney from one.

Two women shared a 2020 Nobel Prize for developing CRISPR-Cas9 gene editing, awarded in which category?

Chemistry was the category, and the award came only eight years after the pair's key paper. It was the first science Nobel won by two women alone.

Which CRISPR-edited food, altered to resist browning, was the first such organism to pass US regulation?

Mushroom it was: a white button variety edited by Yinong Yang. Because he had only cut out a little DNA and added none from another species, the USDA found it had no grounds to regulate it.

Which scientist, raised in Hilo, Hawaii, shared a 2020 Nobel Prize for turning CRISPR-Cas9 into a gene-editing tool?

Jennifer Doudna runs her lab at the University of California, Berkeley. In 2009 she left for a job at Genentech, quit after two months and came back to study CRISPR.

Which French microbiologist, head of a Max Planck unit in Berlin, shared a 2020 Nobel Prize for CRISPR gene editing?

Emmanuelle Charpentier had earlier run labs in Vienna and at Umeå University in Sweden. She founded her Berlin unit, devoted to the science of pathogens, in 2018.

Which University of Alicante microbiologist coined the acronym CRISPR for the repeated DNA he found in microbes?

Francisco Mojica settled on the name in letters with Ruud Jansen of Utrecht University, to end a muddle of rival labels. His own earlier label was SRSR, for short regularly spaced repeats.

Which Chinese scientist was jailed after announcing in 2018 that he had made the first gene-edited babies with CRISPR?

He Jiankui was convicted of illegal medical practice, sentenced to three years and fined three million yuan. He walked free in April 2022.

Which MIT scientist, raised in Iowa from age 11, led one of the first teams to edit human cells with CRISPR-Cas9?

Feng Zhang had already helped invent optogenetics, a way of controlling brain cells with light. He left China for Des Moines with his mother as a boy.

Which Cambridge, Massachusetts research centre fought the University of California for years over CRISPR patents?

Broad Institute lawyers won the key US rulings: judges found its team was first to make the tool work in practice, even though the California group was credited with conceiving it.

Which Harvard professor's lab invented base editing and prime editing, CRISPR offshoots that avoid cutting both strands?

David Liu became a Harvard professor at 26 and won a 2025 Breakthrough Prize for the two techniques. Base editing converts a single DNA letter into another without breaking the double helix.

Which biographer of Steve Jobs and Leonardo da Vinci wrote The Code Breaker, a 2021 book about the pioneers of CRISPR?

Walter Isaacson had already written lives of Einstein, Franklin and Kissinger. He followed the gene-editing book with a biography of Elon Musk.

Which gut bacterium was Yoshizumi Ishino's team sequencing in 1987 when it stumbled on the repeats later named CRISPR?

E. coli gave up the oddity by accident: the team was after a gene called iap and cloned part of the neighbouring repeats with it. Their purpose stayed unknown for years.

Which country's regulator became the first to approve the CRISPR gene therapy Casgevy, in November 2023?

United Kingdom regulators cleared it weeks before Bahrain and the United States followed. The one-time treatment was developed by Vertex Pharmaceuticals and CRISPR Therapeutics.

In the acronym CRISPR, which describes repeated stretches of bacterial DNA, which word does the letter P stand for?

Palindromic describes the repeats, whose DNA letters read alike in both directions. In full the name is clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats.

What kind of molecule, matching about 20 letters of its target, leads the Cas9 enzyme to the DNA it will cut?

A strand of RNA does the steering: about 20 of its letters pair with matching DNA, and Cas9 cuts there. Rewriting those letters retargets the enzyme, which is why CRISPR is so easy to program.

Cas9 cuts both strands of the DNA double helix at a chosen site, which places it in which class of enzymes?

Nuclease is the name for any enzyme that cuts DNA or its chemical cousins. Cas9 carries two cutting domains, called HNH and RuvC, one for each strand of the helix.

What name is given to the snippets of viral DNA that bacteria file between the repeats of a CRISPR array?

Spacers are fragments of DNA taken from viruses that attacked the cell before. New ones are usually added at the front of the array, so it reads as a running record of past infections.

CRISPR turns up in about half of sequenced bacteria and nearly 90% of which other group of single-celled microbes?

Archaea resemble bacteria but form their own domain of life. Spanish work in the 1990s on one of them, Haloferax, is how CRISPR came to get its name.

In dCas9, a version of the enzyme that grips DNA without cutting it, what does the letter d stand for?

Dead describes its cutting sites, which have been knocked out. The protein still homes in on a chosen gene, so it can block that gene or carry other tools to it.

Cas9 only cuts where its target sits beside a short DNA tag such as NGG, known by which three-letter abbreviation?

PAM stands for protospacer adjacent motif. Bacteria keep the tag out of their own CRISPR arrays, which stops Cas9 from shredding the cell's own stored DNA.

Which term describes gene edits made in embryos, eggs or sperm, the heritable kind used on twins born in China in 2018?

Germline edits reach the cells that make the next generation, so descendants inherit them. Somatic edits, the kind used in approved therapies, end with the patient.

After Cas9 cuts DNA, which precise cellular pathway lets scientists paste in a new sequence from a supplied template?

Homology-directed repair copies from a matching template, so it can write in an exact edit. Cells more often use a faster pathway that simply rejoins the ends and tends to scramble the gene.

The Gates Foundation has put $75 million into CRISPR gene drives to curb insects that spread which disease?

Malaria is the target, and the project is named Target Malaria. A gene drive copies itself onto the matching chromosome from the other parent, so one trait can sweep through wild mosquitoes within generations.

Which nickname describes children whose traits might be chosen before birth by editing embryos with CRISPR?

Designer babies is the phrase critics reach for when warning that embryo editing could drift from curing disease to cosmetic choices. It also covers embryos picked after genetic screening in IVF.

A CRISPR-based test for viruses and bacteria takes its acronym from the first name of which fictional detective?

Sherlock Holmes shares his first name with SHERLOCK, short for Specific High sensitivity Enzymatic Reporter UnLOCKing. The test can pick out a microbe from a few stray molecules in a sample.

Which CRISPR-edited food, the first on public sale in Japan, was engineered to hold about five times the usual GABA?

Tomato was the pick: the Sicilian Rouge High GABA variety, from the Japanese firm Sanatech Seed, went on sale in September 2021. GABA is a compound the brain uses to calm nerve signals.

KJ Muldoon, the first person given a personalised CRISPR therapy, was treated at a children's hospital in which US city?

Philadelphia doctors diagnosed his rare disorder soon after birth: his body could not clear ammonia. A therapy made for him alone was ready in six months, and his first dose came in February 2025.

The 2018 claim of the first CRISPR-edited babies was presented at a genome-editing summit held in which Asian city?

Hong Kong hosted the summit at its university, where security had to escort the speaker in from his hotel. Chinese authorities suspended his research the next day.

In 2020 a CRISPR treatment was first used to edit DNA inside a living patient's body; which organ got the injection?

The eye was chosen to treat Leber congenital amaurosis, an inherited cause of blindness, with the editor carried in by a harmless virus. Earlier CRISPR therapies edited cells outside the body.

Biochemist Virginijus Šikšnys, who shared the 2018 Kavli Prize for CRISPR-Cas9 work, is a professor in which country?

Lithuania's Vilnius University is his base. His team was among the first to show that Cas9 could be programmed to cut chosen DNA, sending off its paper in April 2012.

Before CRISPR, gene editing relied on slow-to-build proteins whose DNA-gripping fingers are named after which metal?

Zinc finger tools needed a new protein designed for every target, which was slow and costly. CRISPR only needs a new guide sequence, a far quicker job.

What term covers the unintended edits CRISPR-Cas9 makes when it cuts DNA that merely resembles the intended site?

Off-target effects arise because Cas9 tolerates a few mismatches between its guide and the DNA. Stray cuts can alter the function of healthy genes, a central safety worry for therapies.

Which 2017 book on CRISPR, co-written with Samuel Sternberg, is a first-person account by one of its Nobel winners?

A Crack in Creation tells the story of the breakthrough for general readers, from inside the lab that made it. Its subtitle promises gene editing and the unthinkable power to control evolution.