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.
Francis Mojica, microbiologist from the University of Alicante (Spain) who discovered the CRISPR arrays in archaea, coined the name of CRISPR and first proposed that this was a prokaryote acquired immune defense system.
The recent ARRIGE kick-off meeting in Paris had the pleasure to have Francisco Juan Martínez Mojica (Francis Mojica), microbiologist from the University of Alicante (Spain), delivering the first keynote lecture of the conference. In his very interesting talk, Francis Mojica reviewed the origins of the CRISPR systems in prokaryotes, as part of an ancient acquired immune defense system, and their recent conversion into powerful genome editing tools. He is convinced that we are just beginning to understand the unexpected complexity of bacterial immune systems. CRISPR could be just one of many, yet to be identified and described. There is a great future ahead in the field of Molecular Microbiology for discovering new CRISPR and CRISPR-like systems that could be transformed and adapted for the efficient and safe manipulation of genomes, including the human genome.