Dr Muruga Vadivale flipped this story into Cyberdoc's Corner•1837d
Back in the 1980s, researchers began to notice a strange pattern in the genes of many microbes. There would be a stretch of DNA that read the same forward and backward, then a stretch of what looked like junk, then another palindrome, and so on. No one knew what the segments were for, but they were striking enough that a pair of scientists in Europe dubbed them “clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats,” or Crispr for short.
As it turned out, the mysterious sequences were an immune system. When a microbe was exposed to a new virus, it would cut a swatch of the invader’s DNA (the junk) and store it safely between two dividers (the palindromes). That way, if the virus ever returned, the microbe could simply consult its archive and dispatch the proper immune response