Lindau, June 28 (BTA/GNA) – Nobel laureate Emmanuelle Charpentier noted that Bulgarian researcher Elitza Deltcheva was integral part of the team that helped her and Jennifer Doudna win a Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 2020 for the development of a genome editing method. “Deltcheva was a driving force in the genome editing project,” Charpentier said in response to a question from BTA on Wednesday. Charpentier spoke to journalists from six media outlets from five countries, including BTA, at the annual gathering of Nobel Laureates at Lindau (Germany).
“She [Deltcheva] was a PhD student and told me that she would stay on after her studies to finish the project. We worked together on a study published in Nature magazine. She was a driving force in the project,” Charpentier added.
Deltcheva worked with Charpentier in her lab in Vienna. In 2009, the future Nobelist continued her work at the Umea Centre for microbial research in Sweden. With Delcheva’s help, Charpentier showed that CRISPR technology can edit DNA at specific points in the genome.
Charpentier named Deltcheva among the members of her teams who contributed to the Nobel Prize-winning technology. It is already being widely applied by research teams, pharmaceutical companies are developing therapies to treat rare diseases, and it is also being sought for use in agriculture, she explained during the forum.
Diversity in scientific teams is very important, Charpentier noted. “If only national teams work in the laboratories in Europe, we will have a generation of young scientists who are less driven and ambitious because they are mainly in their comfort zone. Diversity in international teams creates a competitive environment, not because the scientists in these teams are competing with each other, but because they are progressing together,” she pointed out and added that science requires people who are “hungry” to do research, and many of them are in countries where it is difficult to do science.
BTA/GNA