Biography | Emmanuelle Charpentier — The Vienna Lab Where Streptococcus Started Talking

People treat Umeå as the room CRISPR was found in. The first independent bench was here. Max Perutz Labs, then Max F. Perutz Laboratories, stand on the Vienna Biocenter at Dr.-Bohr-Gasse 9 in the third district. Charpentier came back to Europe in 2002 as a guest and assistant professor at the Institute of Microbiology and Genetics, University of Vienna. From 2006 to 2009 she was associate professor in this house. The habilitation in microbiology was examined on this campus in 2006. The organism on the bench was Streptococcus pyogenes. The question was how a human pathogen regulated itself with RNA. One of those RNAs later proved to be tracrRNA, the missing piece that made Cas9 a programmable cutter. Vienna is the city the later citations skip. The 2012 Science paper names Berkeley and Umeå. The RNA that made the paper possible was isolated on this lot. Dr.-Bohr-Gasse 9 is the address a visitor can still walk to. Photo: Wikimedia Commons, Vienna Biocenter