Jennifer Anne Doudna is a Professor of Chemistry and of Molecular and Cell Biology at the University of California, Berkeley.
Education
Doudna earned her Bachelor of Arts degree in Chemistry from Pomona College in 1985, and her Doctor of Philosophy in Biochemistry from Harvard University on ribozymes under the mentorship of Jack West. Szostak. She did her postdoctoral work with Thomas Cech at the University of Colorado, Boulder.
Career
She has been an investigator with the Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) since 1997. While in the Szostak lab, Doudna reengineered the self-splicing Group I catalytic intron into a true catalytic ribozyme that would copy Ribonucleic acid templates. Recognizing the limitations of not being able see the molecular mechanisms of the ribozymes, she started work to crystallize and solve the three-dimensional structure of the Tetrahymena Group I ribozyme in 1991 in the Cech Laboratory and continued while she started her professorship at Yale University in 1994.
While the group was able to grow high-quality crystals, they struggled with the phase problem due to unspecific binding of the metal ions.
Using this strategy, they were able to solve the structure, the second solved folded Ribonucleic acid structure since tRNA. The magnesium ions would cluster at the center of the ribozyme and would serve as a core for Ribonucleic acid folding similar to that of a hydrophobic core of a protein. Doudna was promoted to the position of Henry Ford II Professor of Molecular Biophysics and Biochemistry at Yale in 2000.
In 2002, she accepted a faculty position at University of California, Berkeley as a Professor of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology so that she would be closer to family and the synchrotron at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. This initial work to solve large Ribonucleic acid structures led to further structural studies on the HDV ribozyme, the IRES, and protein-Ribonucleic acid complexes like the Signal recognition particle.
Her lab now focuses on obtaining a mechanistic understanding of biological processes involving Ribonucleic acid. This work is divided over three major areas, the CRISPR system, Ribonucleic acid interference, and translational control via MicroRNAs.
In 2012 Doudna and her colleagues generated a new discovery that would reduce the time and work needed to edit genomic deoxyribonucleic acid. Their discovery relies on a protein named Cas9 found in the Streptococcus bacteria "CRISPR" immune system that works like scissors. The protein attacks its prey, the deoxyribonucleic acid of viruses, and slices it up. In 2015, Doudna gave a TED Talk about the bioethics of using CRISPR. Honors and
Membership
National Academy of Sciences. American Academy of Arts and Sciences.