Emily P. Bentley is a Blog Writer at Addgene. She earned her PhD in molecular biology and biophysics from Scripps Research, and she loves supporting open science and learning about new research.
The genome-editing tool CRISPR is famously RNA-guided... except when it’s not. Turns out, carefully designed RNA-DNA hybrid strands work just as well—or maybe even better—at guiding Cas nucleases to specific genomic targets.
Who doesn’t love a library? A traditional library might contain thousands or millions of different books. Addgene’s pooled libraries are a little different: each is a collection of plasmids that share the same backbone and differ only in a small region. This makes them useful ...
It was huge news earlier this year: the first patient in the world, an infant, was successfully treated with a CRISPR gene editing therapy personalized to his genetic mutation. “Baby KJ” was diagnosed with a rare and dangerous metabolic disease shortly after his birth. Within a ...
These days, it hardly seems like we finish writing about one dual CRISPR-transposon system before another exciting new advance emerges! The programmability and targeting power of CRISPR combined with the large sequence capacity of transposons open whole new worlds to explore. ...
I fell in love with biology because of an image that was honestly quite boring.
Ah, the notorious western blot: we meet again. So useful, yet so finicky to design and optimize. Today we’ll cover the normalization and loading controls needed for relative quantification of a western blot — and why you might want to be careful relying on so called ...
In our last post, we talked about the first base transversion editors: CGBEs, or C → G Base Editors. CGBEs first convert a cytosine (C) to uracil (U), just like Cytosine Base Editors (CBEs). But unlike CBEs, CGBEs then excise the U to create an abasic (empty) DNA site using ...
The first base editors revolutionized CRISPR gene editing. Cytosine base editors (CBEs) and adenine base editors (ABEs) chemically modify target bases without breaking the DNA backbone, making them efficient and precise tools for altering DNA sequences. These first base editors ...
