1990

Francisco Mojica, graduate student at University of Alicante (coast of Spain) determines the function of the repeated sequences in bacteria cells, identifying 14 identical DNA sequences repeated at regular intervals in the archaea. In 1995, by which time researchers had found the repeated clusters in 20 species of bacteria and archaea, Mojica came up with name CRISPR (clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats). The name was formalized by Dutch scientist Ruud Jensen in a paper of 2002, where he reported his discovery that CRISPR sequences were flanked by a gene that encoded directions for making an enzyme. He named these CRISPR-associated or Cas, enzymes (Isaacson, 71-73).