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When I started writing for the Addgene blog, I was focused on writing about new scientific techniques and cool plasmids. Creating graphics were usually the last thing I thought about when writing posts. Since then I’ve realized my figures are just as important, if not more important, than my writing. Initially I didn’t have access to professional-grade design software, like Adobe Illustrator, and I didn’t want to pay for these programs either. But with a little Googling and some trial and error, I found some free design software that let me create graphics that better communicated the science in my blog posts. This post highlights several of these free tools which will hopefully also help you communicate your science, whether it’s in presentations, manuscripts, or social media.

Every few months we highlight a subset of the new plasmids in the repository through our hot plasmids articles. These articles provide brief summaries of recent plasmid deposits and we hope they'll make it easier for you to find and use the plasmids you need. If you'd ever like to write about a recent plasmid deposit please sign up here. 

Fluorescent proteins have enabled scientists to pursue creative research avenues previously unavailable to them. With these tools it’s now easy to monitor protein expression, localization, and protein-protein interactions. Beyond these common applications, researchers are finding new ways to apply fluorescent proteins everyday. 

While much of CRISPR research has focused on genome editing, numerous discoveries have been made using the Cas9 nuclease in the absence of genomic alterations. These studies utilize a catalytically inactive form of Cas9 known as dCas9 (Jinek et al., 2012). Like Cas9, dCas9 can bind to a specific DNA sequence via a targeting gRNA. But dCas9 does not cleave the DNA. Much of the research using dCas9 has focused on transcriptional activation using a fusion to a transcriptional activator such as VP64 (Gilbert et al., 2013), or repression of transcription through binding a promoter region to inhibit association of transcriptional activators (Qi et al., 2013). However, the fusion of dCas9 with a protein tag allows for the isolation of a genomic region of interest targeted by a gRNA.

In this quarterly blog series, we’ll highlight a few of the new CRISPR plasmids available at Addgene. We will still periodically focus on specific CRISPR plasmid tools more in-depth, but we hope that this blog series will help you find new CRISPR tools for your research!

This time:

• E. coli genome-wide CRISPR inhibition
• Covalent tethering of DNA template to Cas9
• SECURE base editors
• Nme2Cas9
• CRISPR interference in Candida albicans