FEBS Press would like to congratulate Emmanuelle Charpentier and Jennifer Doudna on winning the Nobel Prize in Chemistry 2020 for the development of a method for genome editing.

 In prokaryotes the CRISPR-Cas system is a form of acquired immunity, whereby short bacterial RNAs complementary to pathogenic sequences target foreign DNA and drive the Cas endonuclease to cut them. Scientists found that this system could be exploited for gene editing purposes. Jennifer Doudna and Emmanuelle Charpentier developed a technique making use of a specifically engineered guide RNA, which, when combined with Cas9, can find and cut the DNA target identified by the guide RNA.

 To celebrate this award, we’ve put together a selection of articles published in the FEBS Press journals that build on the gene editing technology first demonstrated by Charpentier and Doudna, and some that demonstrate the widespread utility of this technique in all areas of molecular biology. You can read this Virtual Issue here.

In addition, The FEBS Journal Special Issue on CRISPR/Cas9 Gene Editing provides a wider context of this technique.