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Emily P. Bentley

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.

Blog articles by Emily P. Bentley

CRISPR

Build Your CRISPR Vocabulary

Emily P. Bentley July 2, 2024

CRISPR is a sleek acronym for a real mouthful of a phrase: Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats. That contrast of simplicity and complexity is reflected in the biology, too. CRISPR is an elegant bacterial immune system and an efficient gene editing tool… but ...
Overview of the parts of CRISPR. The bacterial chromosome encodes a tracrRNA (in some systems including Cas9), Cas proteins, and a CRISPR array. The CRISPR array is composed of identical repeat sequences and variable spacer sequences. The array is transcribed and processed into crRNAs, each including one repeat and one spacer. In bacteria, these crRNAs are bound by Cas proteins (Cas9 shown here). The repeat sequence base pairs with the tracrRNA, and the spacer sequence is used to target complementary DNA sequences. In laboratory settings, an sgRNA includes the crRNA and tracrRNA sequences in a “single-guide RNA” that performs both functions. Cas9 cuts both the target and nontarget DNA strands upstream of the PAM site found in the nontarget strand.
CRISPR

A Needle in a Base-Stack: Cas9 Structural Biology

Emily P. Bentley June 4, 2024

Have you ever designed a CRISPR guide RNA and wondered why it is limited to only 20 bases, or why it’s so important to choose a target sequence with a nearby protospacer-adjacent motif (PAM)? Cas9 is becoming an ever more ubiquitous tool for genome engineering, and studying its ...
Cartoon summary of Cas9 activity.

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