Credited to Lithuania. The same advance was made independently by Jennifer Doudna and Emmanuelle Charpentier, whose paper appeared online in Science on June 28, 2012, before the Vilnius paper appeared in PNAS on September 25, 2012. They alone received the 2020 Nobel Prize in Chemistry. Šikšnys shared the 2018 Kavli Prize with them, so the Vilnius claim is one of independent co-discovery, not sole origin.
How it began
Virginijus Šikšnys, a biochemist at the Institute of Biotechnology of Vilnius University, first showed that the CRISPR-Cas9 system, a bacterial immune mechanism, could be transferred from one bacterium to another. His group then developed a way to steer the CRISPR-Cas9 complex to specific targets on a genome, which he called directed DNA surgery. The group submitted its paper to the journal Cell on April 6, 2012. It was published online by the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences on September 25, 2012.
How it works
CRISPR-Cas9 is a defense system that bacteria use against invaders. The Cas9 protein cuts DNA at a place set by short guide RNA. The Vilnius paper showed that the cutting site can be programmed by changing the RNA, using two RNA fragments as the guide where the Berkeley group used one. The paper stated that the results pave the way for engineering of universal programmable RNA-guided DNA endonucleases.
Who pushed back
The paper was rejected by Cell without being sent for peer review, and then by Cell Reports, before moving slowly through editing at PNAS. Jennifer Doudna and Emmanuelle Charpentier meanwhile reported the same advance in Science, online on June 28, 2012, and received far more attention. Science magazine wrote in 2018 that the part Šikšnys played had often been overlooked. Asked about the delay, he said the question should be put to the editors.
What lasted
Feng Zhang's group at the Broad Institute built on these findings to show that CRISPR-Cas9 works in mammalian cells, which Šikšnys called a logical step that led to a very large number of applications. In 2018 the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters awarded the Kavli Prize, worth 1 million dollars, to Šikšnys, Doudna and Charpentier. The 2020 Nobel Prize in Chemistry went to Charpentier and Doudna only.
