Danisco yogurt strain research showed CRISPR is a bacterial adaptive immune system

Rodolphe Barrangou of Danisco, a Danish food ingredients maker and leading producer of yogurt and cheese cultures, traced how industrial phage resistance work revealed CRISPR function. Archived frozen strains differed from their parents only by an added repeat and spacer in the CRISPR array, and adding a spacer conferred resistance while removing it or knocking out CAS9 abolished it. The team published its first high-impact CRISPR paper in March 2007, proving CRISPR is a bacterial adaptive immune system.