Bacteria invent another way to turn on genes

In their landmark 1961 paper on the lac operon, Nobel laureates François Jacob and Jacques Monod speculated that RNA might control gene activity in bacteria through base-pairing interactions. But once protein transcription factors were discovered, the idea was tossed aside. Sixty years later, a multi-institutional team of biologists shows that Jacob and Monod were on to something. Some species of bacteria, reports the team in Nature, have evolved an RNA-guided gene activating system by transforming a copy of a CRISPR-Cas gene-cutting system.