Name: The "Holy Grail of Yogurt" is CRISPR
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Bacteria use CRISPR to defend themselves from viruses. Here's how researchers have used it to benefit yogurt cultures since 2007.

Five years before anybody was talking about CRISPR, Danisco had a breakthrough.

The "Holy Grail of Yogurt" is CRISPR

"Holy Grail of Yogurt" is CRISPR

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Bacteria use CRISPR to defend themselves from viruses. Here's how researchers have used it to benefit yogurt cultures since 2007.This is video is an excerpt from <a href="https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/video/human-nature/">Human Nature</a>.

Five years before anybody was talking about CRISPR, Danisco had a breakthrough.

Body & Brain

The "Holy Grail of Yogurt" is CRISPRPublished: September 25, 2020Antonio Regalado: I have my own way of, kind of telling the story in short form is I show this article from 2007, right? Five years before anybody was talking about CRIS and it’s this headline from a yogurt company saying, “Holy grail is discovered.” And what was this yogurt company’s holy grail? It was CRISPR. Jill Banfield: Danisco is a company that sells microbes to people who want to make food. A lot of foods are produced using bacteria, and…yogurt, for example. Rodolphe was trying to work out how to deal with the problem of his bacterial cultures suddenly dying because of viral infections.Fyodor Urnov: Most people don’t wake up in the morning and think about how bacteria defend themselves against viruses. It’s just not on their, sort of front and center in people’s agenda, but it should be.Luciano Marraffini: Viruses are very simple, lean machines. They have one job to do: look for a host, take the host over and multiply. That’s it. The virus will attach to the surface… and then it will inject its genetic material. It hijacks the cell and uses the cell just as a factory of new viruses. And then it’s over. It’s over for the cell.Rodolphe Barrangou: This is when people call companies like Danisco and say “You sold us a culture that’s not working. We want our money back.” But there’s a small subset of the population that survives the viral attack. We don’t know why they make it, but they make it. They become resistant. At that time, we still don’t know what CRISPR is or what it does, so there’s no assumption that CRISPR is involved. Then what we do is we take the survivor that made it and then we check its D.N.A. The D.N.A. sequence had changed.Francisco Mojica: There are new spacers that were not present before to sequences from the viruses that infected the bacteria.Banfield: And now it’s immune.Urnov: So, now, scientists have a clue. And you know, at this point, of course you’ve sort of put your Sherlock Holmes hat on. You take in your virtual pipe, and you go “What are these clues telling us?” We do the experiment five different times.And consistently the bacteria acquired a spacer that contains a sequence from the virus and became resistant. So, what if I take it away? You lose the resistance.Banfield: Without that little piece of D.N.A. microbial cell, the bacterial cell will die, and if it had it, it would survive.Barrangou: Oh, that was like, that was like, “We got it.”CRISPR is an immune system.Banfield: What an idea! A piece of the genome of your predator now stuck in your genome, so you can recognize it in the future.Mojica: Bacteria have memory. They are able to remember invaders, recognize them, and kill them. That was really fantastic.

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The "Holy Grail of Yogurt" is CRISPR

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Human Nature

How CRISPR Works in Nature