Roundup Record Tribune & Winnett Times -

Marshall Swearingen, MSU News Service

BOZEMAN — As news began to circulate on Wednesday that American scientist Jennifer Doudna had won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry with France’s Emmanuelle Charpentier, Montana State University researcher Blake Wiedenheft was among the first to hear, with a pre-dawn phone call from a colleague.

Wiedenheft, whose work in Doudna's lab as a postdoctoral researcher contributed to the breakthrough discovery that earned her what is widely considered science's top honor, immediately sent a heartfelt note of congratulations to his mentor, whom he described as a humble champion of higher education.

"This is something that many of us have been anticipating for quite a while," said Wiedenheft, associate professor in the Department of Microbiology and Immunology in MSU's College of Agriculture. "It's not news that she's an accomplished scientist, but it's very gratifying to see her get this recognition."

Doudna, a professor at University of California, Berkeley, pioneered the repurposing of a bacterial immune system called CRISPR into a precision genome-editing technology that is rapidly reshaping medicine, enabling previously unthinkable cures for genetic diseases, the promise of overcoming cancer and a toolbox of new tactics for treating viral infections.

"Rarely is there a discovery so profound that it goes from basic science to a health care breakthrough in such a short period of time," said Wiedenheft, who partnered with Doudna on CRISPR research from 2007 until he joined MSU's faculty in 2012.

When Wiedenheft landed in Doudna's lab, CRISPR "was a curious biological phenomenon. We were surprised and delighted by how sophisticated bacteria were at defending themselves against viruses," he said. "But repurposing that into something as important as a molecular scalpel for curing genetic diseases is really the definition of innovation — a once-in-a-lifetime discovery."

CRISPR is an acronym describing how bacteria ward off viruses by incorporating fragments of viral DNA into their own genome. In a 2015 TED Talk, Doudna quotes Wiedenheft in describing CRISPR as a "genetic vaccination card," because CRISPR genes allow bacteria to recognize viruses and then disable them with CRISPR-associated proteins. One of those proteins, called Cas9, works by latching onto viral DNA and cutting it. Doudna's lab figured out how to replace the viral DNA with any genetic sequence so that Cas9 can essentially edit any DNA.

Doudna came to MSU in 2017 to receive the Stibitz Computer and Communications Pioneer Award and the Wilson Biodiversity Technology Pioneer Award from the American Computer and Robotics Museum. The awards were established by the late George Keremedjiev, who founded the museum in Bozeman in 1990 and received an honorary doctorate from MSU in 2009.

Doudna's impact on Wiedenheft's ongoing CRISPR research "would be hard to overstate," he said, and being a part of the early discovery of CRISPR continues to be an inspiration.

Wiedenheft noted that his path to CRISPR research started at MSU, where he earned his bachelor's in 1998. Having grown up in a small town in northeastern Montana, "doing research on something like CRISPR wasn't even something I could imagine as a career," he said. He was inspired to return to MSU and earn a doctorate in 2006, doing research about microbes in Yellowstone National Park with professors Mark Young in the Department of Plant Sciences and Plant Pathology and Trevor Douglas in the chemistry and biochemistry department. "It was the research I did as a graduate student at MSU that prepared me to be a postdoc working on CRISPR, and I was lucky enough to land a position in Jennifer's lab," he said.

That's something he tries to pay forward, by including students in his CRISPR research at MSU, Wiedenheft said. His lab, which recently won a prestigious $2.5 million grant from the National Institutes of Health, includes about six graduate students, three undergraduates and six postdoctoral and research scientists at any time.

Doudna's winning of the Nobel Prize is the kind of announcement that puts wind in the sails of any scientist as they go about the daily work of understanding the world, Wiedenheft said. "It's these sorts of discoveries that keep us coming back again and again. I hope the success of CRISPR helps shine a spotlight on the importance of university research."