CRISPR

Taiwan's top science award, the Tang Prize, has gone to two UC Berkeley scientists well-known in the fields of biochemistry and physics: Jennifer Doudna, for her invention of CRISPR-Cas9 gene editing, and Arthur Rosenfeld, often called the "godfather of energy efficiency."

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Scientists at the University of California, Berkeley and Massachusetts General Hospital have identified a key region within the Cas9 protein that governs how accurately CRISPR-Cas9 homes in on a target DNA sequence, and have tweaked it to produce a hyper-accurate gene editor...

Jennifer Doudna and Feng Zhang have received separate grants from the National Human Genome Research Institute for CRISPR technology-based projects they both say have the potential to advance the tool's usefulness for human health purposes.

The University of California, Berkeley's Doudna will receive $2.1 million to set up and run the Center for Genome Editing and Recording (CGER)....

UC Berkeley is hosting a two-day conference Aug. 16-17 that will bring together farmers, doctors, patients, environmentalists, consumers, nonprofits, community leaders and scientists to discuss potential applications of CRISPR technology, ranging from human and animal health to agriculture and conservation.