Jennifer Doudna Wins ACS’s Priestley Award – Berkeley Lab Information Middle

Jennifer Doudna has been named the recipient of the 2026 Priestley Medal, the best honor bestowed by the American Chemical Society (ACS), for her high-impact discoveries on RNA molecules with enzymatic capabilities, together with the event of CRISPR-Cas9 gene enhancing know-how. 

The ACS announcement cites her excellent analysis “on ribozyme function, Dicer and double-stranded RNA processing and CRISPR gene editing, and for impactful international science leadership.” Doudna will formally settle for the award and ship an deal with on the ACS Spring 2026 convention.

Doudna, a school scientist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab), founding father of the Innovative Genomics Institute, and a professor at UC Berkeley, beforehand acquired the 2020 Nobel Prize in Chemistry and the National Medal of Technology and Innovation for her work on CRISPR-Cas9.

“This revolutionary technology enabled scientists to make precise changes to DNA with unprecedented accuracy and efficiency, fundamentally transforming biology and medicine,” the ACS said of their launch. 

Doudna took an interest within the diverse roles of RNA outdoors its perform as a genetic messenger throughout her schooling at Harvard Medical School, when she designed a self-replicating RNA. As a analysis fellow on the University of Colorado at Boulder, she started crystallizing RNAs in order that she might research their buildings and perceive the bodily foundation of the molecules’ catalytic actions. She continued this work whereas on college at Yale University, and when she joined UC Berkeley and Berkeley Lab in 2002, she pursued her curiosity in how RNA molecules determine what genetic data will get disseminated in cells.

In 2008, Doudna started finding out lately found repetitive sequences in bacterial genomes known as CRISPR, utilizing funding from a Department of Energy Laboratory Directed Research and Development (LDRD) Program award. Her labored helped reveal that the repeats are a part of a bacterial immune protection system that identifies DNA from invading viruses, then deploys enzymes to chop the DNA and neutralize the pathogens. Building upon findings from this early work and different investigations, in 2012, a staff led by Doudna and her co-investigator, Emmanuelle Charpentier, detailed the underlying mechanisms of certainly one of these programs, known as CRISPR-Cas9, and defined how it may be programmed to chop any DNA from any organism at a goal sequence. This seminal work was published in the journal Science.

Today, Doudna and Charpentier’s Nobel Prize-winning CRISPR-Cas9 know-how is used day by day in laboratories the world over to shortly and effectively edit genomes for all kinds of biomedical analysis. CRISPR-Cas is the premise of many promising medical therapies, together with gene therapies that may remedy beforehand intractable genetic illnesses. Scientists are additionally utilizing these applied sciences to design environment friendly and resilient crop vegetation and engineer microbes that may produce priceless biofuels and bioproducts.

Doudna’s research teams proceed to discover purposes for CRISPR-Cas programs and develop new medical therapies. 

###

Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) is dedicated to groundbreaking analysis centered on discovery science and options for ample and dependable power provides. The lab’s experience spans supplies, chemistry, physics, biology, earth and environmental science, arithmetic, and computing. Researchers from world wide depend on the lab’s world-class scientific services for their very own pioneering analysis. Founded in 1931 on the assumption that the largest issues are greatest addressed by groups, Berkeley Lab and its scientists have been acknowledged with 16 Nobel Prizes. Berkeley Lab is a multiprogram nationwide laboratory managed by the University of California for the U.S. Department of Energy’s Office of Science.

DOE’s Office of Science is the only largest supporter of fundamental analysis within the bodily sciences within the United States, and is working to handle a number of the most urgent challenges of our time. For extra data, please go to energy.gov/science.