Explore / Biology
6,031 explorers / 3 open questions / 12800 papers
Cathedral separates the established mechanism, the historical contribution chain, and the unresolved assumptions so each can be inspected independently.
Known nodes connect to ghost nodes where questions remain open.
Credit follows documented contributions. Open questions remain attached to the historical path rather than being presented as context-free prompts.
2011
tracrRNA is identified as essential to the type II CRISPR system.
The discovery supplied a missing mechanistic component of Cas9 targeting.
Emmanuelle Charpentier
Microbiologist whose discovery of tracrRNA and collaboration on programmable Cas9 enabled a general genome-editing method.
2012
Cas9 is engineered as a programmable RNA-guided DNA endonuclease.
The collaboration showed how a bacterial immune mechanism could be simplified into a general editing tool.
Jennifer Doudna
Biochemist who co-developed programmable CRISPR-Cas9 genome editing and has led work on its responsible use.
Open questions
Ghost nodes
How can genome editors be delivered safely and precisely to every clinically relevant tissue?
CRISPR research community / 0 active
Delivery, immune response, tissue specificity, and manufacturability remain coupled bottlenecks.
Evidence trail: Nobel Prize scientific backgroundopenHow can off-target and unintended on-target edits be predicted across diverse human genomes?
CRISPR research community / 0 active
Sequence context, cell state, repair pathway, and measurement sensitivity still limit universal prediction.
Evidence trail: A programmable dual-RNA-guided DNA endonuclease