Order of authorship in the original publication: Jinek, Chylinski, Fonfar, Hauer, Doudna, Charpentier. Doudna, Charpentier and colleagues showed for the first time that the CRISPR evolutionary immune tool of bacteria against bacteriophages could be manipulated, reprogrammed, and guided to make very specific "cuts" on desired target segments of DNA in the lab, making this a gene-targeting and genome-editing tool. This potentially allowed scientists to change or rewrite the genetic code of any organism at will. However, at this point the science was only applied to bacteria.

Digital facsimile from PubMedCentral at this link.

(Thanks to Juan Weiss for this reference and its interpretation.)

Order of authorship in the original paper: Doubna, Charpenter.

"Abstract

"The advent of facile genome engineering using the bacterial RNA-guided CRISPR-Cas9 system in animals and plants is transforming biology. We review the history of CRISPR (clustered regularly interspaced palindromic repeat) biology from its initial discovery through the elucidation of the CRISPR-Cas9 enzyme mechanism, which has set the stage for remarkable developments using this technology to modify, regulate, or mark genomic loci in a wide variety of cells and organisms from all three domains of life. These results highlight a new era in which genomic manipulation is no longer a bottleneck to experiments, paving the way toward fundamental discoveries in biology, with applications in all branches of biotechnology, as well as strategies for human therapeutics."

(Thanks to Juan Weiss for this reference and its interpretation.)