Scientists are still finding new clever and innovative ways to apply the technology, and dozens of startup companies, including ones founded by Doudna herself, have sprouted up to exploit the potential. Contact But I was always more interested in the fundamentals. The Cas9 protein was most likely acting as an RNA-guided DNA cutter, doing everything it needed to. But since she didn't have a tenured position, she moved her lab to the University of Umea in Sweden. Seit 1. Davies: You ended your 2019 TED talk back in your hometown talking about human embryos. “That’s a future goal—it’s not going to happen next year, but nonetheless it’s something very exciting to think about the future potential of CRISPR.”, In the meantime, Doudna plans to enjoy one of the perks provided by her new honor: a free, personal parking space on the Berkeley campus.±, Like us on Facebook to see similar stories, Postal worker charged after nearly 2,000 pieces of mail, including ballots, found in trash, Shoppers' visits to Whole Foods are rebounding far slower than at other grocers, and the company blames its vanishing lunchtime business, Nobel Prize in Chemistry Awarded to First All-Female Team for CRISPR Gene Editing, © Alexander Heinl—picture alliance/Getty Images. In the meantime, to ensure continued support, we are displaying the site without styles Then I did my PhD in structural biology in Germany. [4], Im Jahr 2013 sprach der European Research Council Martin Jinek eine Förderung (Starting Grant) von 1,5 Millionen Schweizer Franken zur Finanzierung seiner Forschung in Zürich zu. The lab had tried at some point earlier, but it never really went anywhere. Internet Explorer). But it also took me some time to look for and find a faculty position. What about after the paper was published? Nature There has been a very good international response to that incident that galvanized an international effort to make sure we have a culture of transparency globally, and that as a community we work to ensure responsible use of the technology.”, That may someday even include a more potent way to protect against infectious diseases like the coronavirus that has had such a devastating effect on countries and their economies. Jínek: Yes, I moved there for the last 2 years of high school. Enter your email address below and we will send you your username, If the address matches an existing account you will receive an email with instructions to retrieve your username. He studied Chemistry and Natural Sciences at Trinity College, University of Cambridge (UK). In 2018, for example, Chinese scientist He Jiankui shocked the scientific community when he announced that he had used CRISPR to genetically edit the genomes of human embryos created by a couple in which the father was HIV positive. Davies: There was an interesting episode when Jennifer briefly joined Genentech. But I always stayed in touch with CRISPR. But there'll always be outliers—renegades who might want to go against it. Jínek: No, it was more organic. Jínek: It was again an organic thing, and there were several factors. Five of the ten people in my lab, which began in 2013, are aiming to gain a better structural understanding of the DNA-cutting mechanisms in CRISPR systems so that we can engineer the system to be more efficient and versatile. At the same time, it's a carrier of information. A young scientist who helped to uncover the gene-editing technology CRISPR starts his own lab. We were overtaken by the speed things started to develop. Er interessiert sich für die molekularen Mechanismen, welche die Zellregulation mittels Protein-RNA Interaktionen beeinflussen. R. E. Haurwitz, M. Jinek, B. Wiedenheft, K. Zhou, https://de.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Martin_Jinek&oldid=188451480, „Creative Commons Attribution/Share Alike“. The CRISPR Journal, New Rochelle, New York, USA, Search for more papers by this author Email the corresponding author at kdavies@liebertpub.com ... of Zurich, Zurich, Switzerland, Search for more papers by this author Email the corresponding author at jinek@bioc.uzh.ch. I always had an inclination toward biology and knew that I wanted to do further academic training in the life sciences. Davies: What was the reaction when you first presented the story in your first lab meeting? [1] Jinek begann sein Studium 1998 in Cambridge am dortigen Trinity College und erwarb dort einen Bachelor of Arts in Naturwissenschaften. Jinek war einer von weltweit 41 Wissenschaftlern, die in den Genuss dieses vom HHMI gemeinsam mit der Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, dem Wellcome Trust und der Stiftung Calouste Gulbenkian finanzierten Programms kamen. Martin Jineks Arbeiten betreffen die molekularen Mechanismen der Zellregulierung mittels Protein-RNA-Wechselwirkungen. Martin Jinek is thus happy that this contribution, which will also pave the way for new therapies for various diseases in the future, has been recognized with such a great honor. 1. There were some slight differences, but the recipe turned out more or less the same. We knew this could lead to some very exciting science down the line. In 2011, after 4 years in Jennifer Doudna's lab at UC Berkeley, Martin Jínek was starting to look for faculty positions back in Europe. These were too long to be made by chemical synthesis, so I had to prepare them by in vitro transcription. But the molecular machinery was intriguingly different. There was so much to do, and we only had a limited bandwidth. “I like to call it a democratizing technology, which is widely available and accessible to scientists globally, and not expensive to get hold of,” she says. The technology has also led to a years-long patent battle between University of California, Berkeley, and Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT); MIT’s Feng Zhang was the first to describe CRISPR in so-called eukaryotic cells, which includes those in plants, animals and people, but published his findings several months after Doudna and Charpentier, whose patent claims cover the technology more broadly. In this interview, Jínek talks to The CRISPR Journal's executive editor, Kevin Davies, about his journey to Berkeley, giving details of the key insights and experiments in the Doudna lab and his current research interests. It's a molecular system that uses guide RNAs, but most likely targets DNA. Jínek: There certainly was a sense of urgency. I was looking at Blake, Rachel, Sam Sternberg—projects that they were developing. Because viruses can’t copy their own genomes by themselves, they need to co-opt other organisms, including bacteria, to help them. In eight short years, scientists exploiting CRISPR have figured out how to use it to edit HIV genes out of human cells, cut out a gene responsible for a devastating congenital heart condition, and explore ways to delete cancer-causing genes, all of which could lead to life-saving, and highly sought-after new therapies. Fusing the crRNA and the tracrRNA together would potentially bypass the need for a dedicated processing mechanism that the bacteria had but that eukaryotic cells might not necessarily have functioning in the same way. Not just helping other people in the lab, but something I could work on full time. Jínek: That happened in late 2008, early 2009. He wasn't too keen on freezing in Sweden! [9], Jinek hat mehrere häufig zitierte Fachartikel in Zeitschriften wie Nature und Science veröffentlicht,[10] darunter. At the time (mid-2000s), the exciting topic wasn't CRISPR, it was RNA interference. Doudna and Charpentier are the first all-female winners of the Chemistry Prize, and Doudna is the first female faculty member at University of California, Berkeley to earn the honor. His research is focused on protein-RNA interactions and macromolecular complexes involved in post-transcriptional regulation of gene expression or in genome defense pathways such as CRISPR-Cas. I only managed to finish that in Zurich. Eric Lander, founding director of the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, where Zhang also holds an appointment, tweeted “huge congratulations” to the duo. I had an opportunity to go there as part of a scholarship program for, I guess, talented kids from Eastern Europe. No specialized training or equipment is needed to use the tech; you simply need to license it. She was a fantastic mentor, and being in her lab at an early phase of her career has shaped my own lab. If they could have been a bit shorter, we could have just ordered them from a company. This was why, in early 2013, it wasn't just Church and Zhang in Science, there were other papers published very shortly after, ours included6—all converged on the same set of parameters for how to put this to work. About 2 weeks later, Blake Wiedenheft showed up for his postdoc interview, and presented the idea of working on CRISPR. I continued to work on non-CRISPR projects for almost 3 years. But that base-paired region was a lot shorter than what was initially predicted based on the complementarity of their sequences. Martin Jinek ist seit Februar 2013 Assistenzprofessor (tenure track) am Biochemischen Institut. When I started as a postdoc in Jennifer Doudna's group at the University of California, Berkeley, in 2007, we knew practically nothing about CRISPR, which stands for 'clustered regularly interspersed palindromic repeats'. Jínek: It was a combination of factors. Science 337, 816–821; 2012), three labs — including ours — were using it as a genome-editing tool. So, the mechanism would have to be quite different, which made it very interesting. Building the team: The Doudna-Charpentier collaboration is sealed on the steps of Stanley Hall, University of California, Berkeley, in 2012. (This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.). So, to change something like this, you'd have to change the mind of the entire electorate. When my PhD was finishing, I was looking at labs where I could focus on biochemistry and structural biology of RNA. We all had other motives! My interest in this was mechanistic—how the hell does this work? Our first goal was to purify enough Cas9 to do both biochemical studies and work toward a crystal structure. The ZFN and TALEN people had already shown us how to go about it. That project, in collaboration with Emmanuelle Charpentier's group, turned into a pivotal paper in 2012, launching the CRISPR-Cas9 revolution. I went through that period. https://doi.org/10.1038/nj7569-415a. You could argue it's easy for me to say this, now that I'm in Switzerland, where there's a constitutional ban on germline editing and very strong consensus in society against it. When the incessant ringing finally roused her at 3 a.m., it was a reporter who wanted her reaction to the just-awarded Nobel Prize in Chemistry.