11 Facts About Francisco Mojica

Francisco Juan Martinez Mojica was born on 5 October 1963 and is a Spanish molecular biologist and microbiologist at the University of Alicante in Spain.

Francisco Mojica is known for his discovery of repetitive, functional DNA sequences in bacteria which he named CRISPR.

Francisco Mojica attended Los Andes elementary school, Vazquez de Mella school, and Instituto Carrus high school.

Francisco Mojica enrolled first at the University of Murcia to study biology and later moved to the University of Valencia and University of Alicante.

Francisco Mojica then received post-doctoral training at the University of Utah and the University of Oxford.

Since 1994, Francisco Mojica has been a faculty member at the University of Alicante, where he has focused on molecular microbiology, which led to his discovery of the CRISPR system.

Francisco Mojica was the first researcher to characterize what is called a CRISPR locus, reported in 1993.

Francisco Mojica described the complete gene sequence repeats in the archaeal organisms Haloferax and Haloarcula species, and studied their function.

Francisco Mojica continued research on these sequences throughout the 1990s, and in 2000, Mojica recognized that what had been reported as disparate repeat sequences actually shared a common set of features, now known to be the hallmarks of CRISPR sequences.

Francisco Mojica coined the term CRISPR through correspondence with Ruud Jansen of Utrecht University, proposing the acronym of Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats to alleviate the confusion stemming from the numerous acronyms used to describe the sequences in scientific literature.

In 2003, Francisco Mojica wrote the first paper suggesting that CRISPR was an innate microbial immune system.