Mary Gearing was formerly a Scientist at Addgene. She got her start as a Science Communications Intern writing for the Addgene blog and website. As a full-time Addgenie, she still enjoys blogging about CRISPR and other cool plasmids!
In order to bind DNA, Cas9 and other CRISPR enzymes require a short PAM sequence adjacent to the targeted sequence at the locus of interest. SpCas9’s 3’ NGG PAM occurs frequently in GC-rich genomes, but a PAM is not always available near the locus you’d like to modify. To tackle ...
By mutating one of two Cas9 nuclease domains, researchers created the CRISPR nickase. Nickases create a single-strand rather than a double-strand break, and when used with two adjacent gRNAs, can lower the probability of off-target editing. In this post, we’ll summarize how IDT ...
Blugene and I represented Addgene at the recent Keystone meeting on Precision Genome Editing with Programmable Nucleases. Check out #KSgenome on Twitter if you missed our live updates!
Promoters control the binding of RNA polymerase and transcription factors. Since the promoter region drives transcription of a target gene, it therefore determines the timing of gene expression and largely defines the amount of recombinant protein that will be produced. Many ...
Since the start of the CRISPR revolution, Addgene has distributed over 100,000 CRISPR plasmids. But that’s not our only job - we strive to also give you high-quality educational resources to help you do better research. CRISPR is an incredibly fast-moving field, and we want to ...
Note: After this blog was published, a bioRxiv preprint that questions the conclusion of inter-homologue recombination was released. This blog has not been updated in response to this paper. Any hint of CRISPR editing in human embryos has been met with a storm of media coverage. ...
Regulating translation is key to cellular function, especially during development or stress. With ribosome profiling, researchers have been able to study the effects of various stimuli on global translation, but a visual technique to study translation remained elusive. Two ...
Fluorescent imaging techniques have become indispensable tools for molecular and cell biologists over the last two decades, but their use can be limited by a few caveats. Since fluorescent proteins (FP) require external light activation, you can’t use fluorescence to monitor ...