In the late 1980s, researchers discovered that small bits of bacterial genomes are repeated at brief intervals. The repeated sections are palindromes – they read the same in both directions. This gave rise to the term CRISPR – pronounced ‘crisper’ – standing for clustered randomly interspersed short palindromic repeats.
In 2002, in the bacterial genomes, genes were found next to the repeated CRISPR sequences and were unimaginatively called CRISPR-associated genes (cas for short – see Figure 1). Intriguingly, the proteins produced by the cas genes include some enzymes that unravel DNA (helicases) and other enzymes that snip it up (nucleases).
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