Emmanuelle Charpentier

Emmanuelle Charpentier

Emmanuelle Charpentier is a French professor and researcher in microbiology, genetics and biochemistry. Since 2015, she has been a Director at the Max Planck Institute for Infection Biology in Berlin. In 2020, she and American biochemist Jennifer Doudna were awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for the development of a method for genome editing.

About Emmanuelle Charpentier in brief

Summary Emmanuelle CharpentierEmmanuelle Charpentier is a French professor and researcher in microbiology, genetics and biochemistry. Since 2015, she has been a Director at the Max Planck Institute for Infection Biology in Berlin. In 2020, she and American biochemist Jennifer Doudna of the University of California, Berkeley, were awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for the development of a method for genome editing. This was the first science Nobel ever won by two women. She is best known for her Nobel-winning work of deciphering the molecular mechanisms of a bacterial immune system. In particular, she uncovered a novel mechanism for the maturation of CRIS9, a non-coding RNA which is essential for the function ofCRIS9.

The method they developed involved the combination of Cas9 with synthetic synthetic RNA molecules that could be used to make any DNA cuts in any DNA. The discovery was made in the lab of microbiologist Elaine Tuomanen, who investigated how Streptococcus pneumoniae utilizes mobile genetic elements to alter its genome. She also helped demonstrate how S. pneumoniae develop vancomycin resistance. In 2018, she founded an independent research institute, theMax Planck Unit for the Science of Pathogens, in Braunschweig, Germany.