A new study by G. William Arends Professor of Microbiology at the University of Illinois Bill Metcalf with postdoctoral Fellow Dipti Nayak has documented the use of CRISPR-Cas9 mediated genome editing in the third domain of life, Archaea, for the first time. Their groundbreaking work, reported in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, has the potential to vastly accelerate future studies of these organisms, with implications for research including global climate change. Metcalf and Nayak are members of the Carl R. Woese Institute for Genomic Biology at Illinois.