Jennifer A. Doudna, University of California, Berkeley; Howard Hughes Medical Institute; Gladstone Institutes, UCSF
Fundamental research to understand how bacteria fight viral infections uncovered programmable proteins that detect and cut specific DNA sequences. These protein-RNA complexes constitute a powerful toolkit for genome editing in animals, plants and bacteria. Dr. Doudna will present current research into the molecular mechanisms of CRISPR-Cas enzymes, including recent work on CRISPR-CasX and anti-CRISPR inhibitors. She will also describe how mechanistic insights inform the application of genome editing in biomedicine and agriculture.
Reception to follow.
Please register at http://bit.ly/bampton1
See the second lecture here: http://bit.ly/bampton2
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As an internationally renowned professor of Chemistry and Molecular and Cell Biology at U.C. Berkeley, Jennifer Doudna and her colleagues rocked the research world in 2012 by describing a simple way of editing the DNA of any organism using an RNA-guided protein found in bacteria. This technology, called CRISPR-Cas9, has opened the floodgates of possibility for human and non-human applications of gene editing, including assisting researchers in the fight against HIV, sickle cell disease and muscular dystrophy. Doudna is an Investigator with the Howard Hughes Medical Instituteand a member of the National Academy of Sciences, the National Academy of Medicine, the National Academy of Inventors and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. She is also a Foreign Member of the Royal Society, and has received many other honors including the Kavli Prize, the Breakthrough Prize in Life Sciences, the Heineken Prize, the BBVA Foundation Frontiers of Knowledge Award and the Japan Prize. She is the co-author with Sam Sternberg of "A Crack in Creation", a personal account of her research and the societal and ethical implications of gene editing.
