Francisco Mojica


Francisco Juan Martínez Mojica is a Spanish molecular biologist and microbiologist at the University of Alicante in Spain. He is known for his discovery of repetitive, functional DNA sequences in bacteria which he named CRISPR. These were later developed into the first widespread genome editing tool, CRISPR-Cas9.

Early life and education

Mojica was born in Elche, Spain, on 5 October 1963. He attended Los Andes elementary school, Vázquez de Mella school, and Instituto Carrus high school. He enrolled first at the University of Murcia to study biology and later moved to the University of Valencia and University of Alicante. During his doctoral studies, he visited Paris-Sud University. He then received post-doctoral training at the University of Utah and the University of Oxford. Since 1994, Mojica has been a faculty member at the University of Alicante, where he has focused on molecular microbiology, which led to his discovery of the CRISPR system.

Career and research

The discovery of CRISPR

Mojica was the first researcher to characterize what is now called a CRISPR locus, reported in 1993. Part of the sequence was reported previously by Yoshizumi Ishino in 1987. Mojica described the complete gene sequence repeats in the archaeal organisms Haloferax and Haloarcula species, and studied their function. He continued research on these sequences throughout the 1990s, and in 2000, Mojica recognized that what had been reported as disparate repeat sequences actually shared a common set of features, now known to be the hallmarks of CRISPR sequences. He coined the term CRISPR through correspondence with Ruud Jansen of Utrecht University, proposing the acronym of Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats to alleviate the confusion stemming from the numerous acronyms used to describe the sequences in scientific literature.

CRISPR as a microbial immune system

In 2003, Mojica wrote the first paper suggesting that CRISPR was an innate microbial immune system. The paper was rejected by a series of high-profile journals, including Nature, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Molecular Microbiology and Nucleic Acids Research, before finally being accepted by Journal of Molecular Evolution in February, 2005.

Connections and disconnections with Alexander Fleming

It is pertinent to note that the development of this method has broadly followed a similar course to that of penicillin. In 1929, Alexander Fleming pioneered the discovery of its antibiotic capacity and later, in 1935, Howard Florey and Ernst Chain developed its therapeutic application. In 1945, the Nobel Prize in Medicine was awarded jointly to the three aforementioned professionals.
At the mention of the word "penicillin", the general population associates this term with the scientist Fleming, who is recognized as the pioneer in its discovery. In relation to the remarkable CRISPR gene-editing method, the opposite situation occurs in the case of Alexander Fleming. As far as penicillin is concerned, the acknowledgements are for its pioneer, but for the CRISPR method, few have remembered the pioneer of this method, Francisco Mojica.

Awards and honors

Honorary Degrees received

Publications

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