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Francis Mojica, the shadow researcher who made the Nobel of others possible

2023-01-31T15:41:40.186Z


Pioneer of gene editing, the microbiologist from Elche has just resurrected proteins from millions of years ago


A letter to the editor sent to this newspaper regretted that Francis Mojica had not been one of the winners of the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 2020. "It was justice," he stated.

Then the sender highlighted the elegance with which the Elche-born molecular microbiologist had accepted his exclusion.

"Elegance?

I don't know, but what I can honestly say is that I was glad I didn't receive it”, comments the scientist.

It may seem false modesty or a way of downplaying a disappointment, but both his explanations and his way of expressing them are convincing: his greatest desire is to shut himself away to investigate and "enjoy life" without being disturbed.

Several colleagues and collaborators corroborate it.

"Francis considers himself the luckiest man in the world working in his laboratory and knowing that such an important discovery has passed through his hands," explains geneticist Lluís Montoliu.

The discovery to which Montoliu refers is the CRISPR sequences in microorganisms, of high international impact, which has won Mojica numerous awards, for which he is "very grateful".

But awards, especially one like the Nobel, take up a lot of time: obligations, events, presentations... They distract.

This week, by the way, the 59-year-old professor at the University of Alicante gave a lecture at the Royal Swedish Academy after obtaining the ACES-Margarita Salas Award, sponsored by the Areces Foundation.

More information

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Not surprisingly, Mojica was the one who coined that word, CRISPR, which sounds like a brand of a new aperitif, and which is on the lips of all those who count in the world of biotechnology, medicine, genetics, agriculture and science. in general, because it treasures infinite possibilities.

The acronym stands for "clustered regularly spaced short palindromic repeats."

And it arose when the scientist verified some mysterious reiterations and sequences in the DNA of a microorganism from the Santa Pola salt flats, with which he began to work at the end of the eighties.

He named them CRISPR.

Thus, the son of a shoe manufacturer educated without ego among three sisters, who wanted to be a biologist because of the documentaries by Félix Rodríguez de la Fuente, paved the way for the development of the revolutionary CRISPR/Cas9 techniques: a kind of genetic scissors by for which French microbiologist Emmanuelle Charpentier and American biochemist Jennifer Doudna won the Nobel Prize.

It is a method of gene editing, a kind of cut and paste that, efficiently, quickly and cheaply, can rewrite the code of life and cure hereditary diseases, among other things.

A dream come true that also sparks an ethical debate on the limits of its use in humans.

"They are two very hard-working scientists

,"

Mojica points out, about the two women with whom he could have shared the Nobel Prize, who do not stop citing it in their works.

It is necessary for the researchers of the matter to have read the founding article that the microbiologist published in 2005. There he described the discovery of an acquired immunity system of some species of bacteria and archaea;

the way bacteria had to defend themselves against viruses.

The microbes collected information and stored it in their own DNA to repel the aggressor.

That immune system was what was between the spaced CRISPR sequences, a finding that led to and prompted multiple investigations to understand how that system works and be able to manipulate it.

It took him quite a while, however, to publish that article.

The fact that the contribution came from a peripheral scientist, without international collaborators of bells, perhaps fueled the mistrust of major scientific publications such as

Nature

, which rejected it.

At that time, his research field was a minority, says Mojica, always understanding.

In the end it was published by the

Journal of Molecular Evolution

and today it is the third most cited in a medium with more than half a century of history.

Not bad for a scientist, married with no children, who wanted to return to his land to continue his career, also as a teacher, despite the attractive proposal of an Oxford laboratory.

In Alicante, he considers, he lives very well.

"Not everything is science," he says.

He claims not to consider himself brilliant.

“Everyone is as they are and should be known.

He who does it, he is happy.

In research, the one who is brilliant does not need to be very constant.

I am very stubborn.

I have met exceptional people, privileged minds, who are then lazy.

If you know you like something, you have to work on it."

Mojica has not stopped doing it.

He studied Biology and later concentrated on "the bugs you don't see."

In early January, the journal

Nature Microbiology

published his latest research, in collaboration with other Spanish scientists, which sounds as exciting as science fiction, at least to laymen.

“We have reconstructed the ancestors of the CRISPR system, up to 2,600 million years old, and we have compared it with the current one, verifying how this increasingly specialized bacterial immune system for each virus is being refined.

It's amazing."

An investigation that has revived ancestral proteins and that once again opens up new possibilities to improve CRISPR systems and, therefore, life, thanks to that acronym that has its roots in the salt flats of Santa Pola, near his hometown. .

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Source: elparis

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