Mojica had been corresponding with Ruud Jansen of Utrecht University in the Netherlands, who was studying these sequences in tuberculosis bacteria. He had been calling them “direct repeats,” but he agreed that they needed to come up with a better name. Mojica was driving home from his lab one evening when he came up with the name CRISPR, for “clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats.” Although the clunky phrase was almost impossible to remember, the acronym CRISPR was, indeed, crisp and crispy. It sounded friendly rather than intimidating, though the dropped “e” gave it a
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