"CRISPR” (pronounced “crisper”) stands for Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats, which are the hallmark of a bacterial defense system that forms the basis for CRISPR-Cas9 genome editing technology.
Jennifer Doudna, Emmanuelle Charpentier and Feng Zhang, co-inventors of CRISPR/Cas9, are today the faces everyone associates with the gene editing tool. But the one who discovered the mechanism at the core of the tool and who gave CRISPR its name is Francis Mojica, a Professor at the University of Alicante, Spain.
