Emmanuelle Charpentier and Jennifer Doudna winning the 2020 Nobel Prize for Chemistry for their development of the CRISPR method of genome editing is a momentous achievement, supported by the contributions of numerous individuals and institutions, including the Advanced Light Source (ALS) synchrotron user facility at Berkeley Lab. This feature details how Doudna’s research was enabled by the facility’s early embrace of hard X-ray crystallography technology for atomic-level understanding of molecular structure, as well as her use of the Berkeley Center for Structural Biology’s (BCSB’s) wiggler-based beamline 5.0.2 for macromolecular crystallography. Doudna has published some 35 papers using ALS crystallography beamlines, including two cited by the Nobel Committee in its CRISPR-Cas9 scientific background document.
