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 biology as in life, more is often better. More transcription factor binding sites in a promoter lead to higher transcriptional activation. Multiple nuclear localization signals (NLS) increase protein import into the nucleus. In developing their SunTag technology, the Vale and ...
Colorful CRISPR technologies are helping researchers visualize the genome and its organization within the nucleus, also called the 4D nucleome. Visualizing specific loci has historically been difficult, as techniques like fluorescent in situ hybridization (FISH) and chromosome ...
Note: Cpf1 is also called Cas12a. In 2015, Feng Zhang’s lab characterized two Cpf1 nucleases, distant cousins of well-known Cas9. Cpf1 cleaves DNA in a staggered pattern and requires only one RNA rather than the two (tracrRNA and crRNA) needed by Cas9 for cleavage. Now, two new ...
THE ORIGINAL NgAgo ARTICLE DISCUSSED IN THIS POST HAS BEEN RETRACTED AND FOLLOW UP STUDIES HAVE FAILED TO REPEAT THE RESULTS DISCUSSED BELOW Biologists are going gaga over the newest gene-editing protein - a DNA-cleaving Argonaute from Natronobacterium gregoryi, or NgAgo for ...
Lentiviral vectors are one of the most popular and useful viral vectors in the lab. Advantages of lentivirus include a large genetic capacity and the ability to transduce both dividing and non-dividing cells. Lentiviral vectors are the vector of choice for many CRISPR ...
Over 25 million people worldwide are currently infected with the lentivirus HIV-1. Today, HIV-1 can be controlled with antiviral therapies such that the virus is undetectable in the blood. But the virus doesn’t completely disappear; it just hides in latently infected cells. To ...
The crisis of antibiotic resistance is upon us, and the world is unprepared. Each year in the United States, two million people will be infected by antibiotic resistant bacteria. Even when researchers develop new antibiotics, the onset of resistance is swift, as few as five ...
If you follow CRISPR research, you know all about using non-homologous end-joining (NHEJ) to make deletions or homology-directed repair (HDR) to create precise genome edits. But have you heard of another double-stranded break repair mechanism: MMEJ (microhomology-mediated ...
