video

In this short video interview (in Spanish), as a brief summary of a much longer text in El País newspaper, the journalist visits Francisco J. M. Mojica (University of Alicante, Spain) who shows the saltworks of Santa Pola, near Alicante, where he first described the CRISPR arrays from an archaea, 25 years ago. Francis Mojica coined the name of CRISPR (Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats) at the end of 2001 and, two years later discovered that CRISPR were part of an adaptive immune system developed by prokaryotes (bacteria and archaea) as a defense mechanism against the virus (bacteriophages) and other molecules of genetic material that infected  or visited them. Ten years later, the CRISPR bacterial immune system was transformed into an efficient genome editing tool.