Two academic institutions are arguing over who invented Clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats or known as CRISPR.

The war of institutions has started as there are two teams claiming credit for discovering CRISPR, and these are UC Berkeley led by Jennifer Doudna, and MIT and the Broad Institute led by Feng Zhang.

Edita's Medicine is a genome editing company founded by world leaders in the fields of protein engineering, genome editing, and molecular and structural biology, find hard to decide which of the team should be awarded the credit because both have contributed efforts to improve this technology. One of the plans of Edita's is to use CRISPR technology in humans as early as 2017 to treat a rare form of blindness, which was announced in November 2016.

Doudna's team filed for the first CRISPR patent, while Zhang's team had spent some budget to fast-track its own application, and was awarded the patent, Albany Daily Star reported.

CRISPR is also known as Cas9 is a molecule that finds a string of DNA code with an abiility to cut and paste DNA inside the cells of living organisms, including humans, Cosmos Magazine reported. This method has been hailed in science and technology industry because of its potential to cure modify crops and deadly diseases Aside from that, it can even help scientists create genetically engineered designer babies.

Meanwhile, CRISPR can be used to aid Zika. Keith Pardee, a Philosophy Doctor said a low-cost, rapid diagnostic test for the detection of the Zika virus will work to cure patients with Zika. Scientists from Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering, Arizona State University, Boston University, Massachusetts Institute of Technology,Cornell University, Broad Institute, University of Wisconsin-Madison, and the University of Toronto collaborated to develop a cell-free, paper-based platform that can host synthetic gene networks, and help improve diagnosis of Zika-infected patients.

The new test can recognize Zika from the similar disease, dengue virus within a few hours. The test can be stored at room temperature and read with a simple electronic reader, thus making it practical to use controlling widespread of yellow fever diseases.

Topics Crispr, UC Berkeley, Technology, Science