DNA

It’s Not a Lettuce Keeper – It’s CRISPR

CRISPR

CRISPR, as illustrated by Ernesto del Aguila III, NHGRI. This image is in the public domain.

CRISPR (pronounced “crisper”) is an acronym. It stands for “Clusters of Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats.” Don’t worry. I don’t understand that either. The real story about what CRISPR is and what it can do is a lot more interesting than that terminology might suggest. Scientists were smart to come up with a clever, pronounceable acronym. Otherwise, it would be a lot harder to get those of us who are not genetic engineers to pay attention to their research.