Francisco Juan Martínez Mojica[a] (born 5 October 1963) is a Spanish molecular biologist and microbiologist at the University of Alicante in Spain.

He is known for his discovery of repetitive, functional DNA sequences in bacteria which he named CRISPR (Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats).

Since 1994, 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.

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

[3][4] (A selection from those mentioned in the institutional page of the Universidad de Alicante,[13] and those referred by Lander in the article The Heroes of CRISPR[14]) Notes Sources Media related to Francisco Juan Martínez Mojica at Wikimedia Commons