What history tells us XXXVII. CRISPR-Cas: The discovery of an immune system in prokaryotes

Michel Morange (1, 2)

1 Centre Cavaillès
2 La République des savoirs : Lettres, Sciences, Philosophie

The discovery of the CRISPR-Cas9 system of genome editing was the result of an explosive encounter between two different programs of research. One was the study of an ensemble of genomic sequences (CRISPR) present in eubacteria and archaea, the functions of which were totally ignored. The first historical descriptions that have been given of the discovery that these sequences were an immune system of bacteria mention three articles published in 2005 that showed through bioinformatic approaches the presence of bacteriophage sequences in CRISPRs. Two articles published in 2006 and 2007 would have proposed the hypothesis that CRISPR was an immune system, and experimentally demonstrated their protective role against infection. In this article, I show that the three 2005 articles did more : they already proposed the hypothesis that these CRISPR sequences constituted an immune system of bacteria, and they brought arguments in favor of this hypothesis. I explore the reasons why these early contributions were not better acknowledged.

Mots clés: Cas genes; CRISPR; Genome editing; Immune system; RNA interference

Domaines: Histoire, Philosophie et Sociologie des sciences; Biochimie, Biologie Moléculaire

Michel Morange. What history tells us XXXVII. CRISPR-Cas: The discovery of an immune system in prokaryotes. Journal of Biosciences, 2015, ⟨10.1007/s12038-015-9532-6⟩. ⟨hal-01483829⟩