[3] In 2020, Charpentier and American biochemist Jennifer Doudna of the University of California, Berkeley, were awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry "for the development of a method for genome editing" (through CRISPR).

[10] Tuomanen's lab investigated how the pathogen Streptococcus pneumoniae utilizes mobile genetic elements to alter its genome.

[7] After five years in the United States, Charpentier returned to Europe and became the lab head and a guest professor at the Institute of Microbiology and Genetics, University of Vienna, from 2002 to 2004.

[15] She moved to Germany to act as department head and W3 Professor at the Helmholtz Centre for Infection Research[16] in Braunschweig and the Hannover Medical School from 2013 until 2015.

Since 2016, she has been an Honorary Professor at Humboldt University in Berlin; since 2018, she is the Founding and acting director of the Max Planck Unit for the Science of Pathogens.

[19] Charpentier is best known for her Nobel-winning work of deciphering the molecular mechanisms of a bacterial immune system, called CRISPR/Cas9, and repurposing it into a tool for genome editing.

[20] In 2011, Charpentier met Jennifer Doudna at a research conference in San Juan, Puerto Rico, and they began a collaboration.

Synthetic guide RNA is a chimera of crRNA and tracrRNA; therefore, this discovery demonstrated that the CRISPR-Cas9 technology could be used to edit the genome with relative ease.

[22] Researchers worldwide have employed this method successfully to edit the DNA sequences of plants, animals, and laboratory cell lines.