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A similar genetic code is used by most organisms on Earth, but different organisms have different preferences for the codons they use to encode specific amino acids. This is possible because there are 4 bases (A, T, C, and G) and 3 positions in each codon. There are therefore 64 possible codons but only 20 amino acids and 3 stop codons to encode leaving 41 codons unaccounted for. The result is redundancy; multiple codons encode single amino acids. Evolutionary constraints have molded which codons are used preferentially in which organisms - organisms have codon usage bias.

In this episode of the Addgene Podcast, we introduce you to the Journal of Emerging Investigators, an open-access journal that enables high school students to publish peer-reviewed scientific research. You’ll meet some of the folks behind the journal and hear from a fantastic team of high school students who recently submitted to the journal with funding from Addgene.

We're excited to announce that, as in years past, we've been working with the Rare Genomics Institute to provide plasmid grants to researchers working on rare diseases through the BeHEARD Award.

Congratulations to Paula Videira, Michael McMurray, and Richard Gronostajski who each are being awarded free plasmids form Addgene to accelerate their research. Read on to learn how these researchers plan to use plasmids from Addgene to advance their research on diseases of glycosylation, arginine mutagenesis, and neural development.

At Addgene we periodically have Science Clubs where we present developments in biology research to the whole company with the goal of educating both scientists and nonscientists alike. As part of these presentations, we generally create one page cheat sheets that attendees can use to quickly reference information that they (hopefully) learn at science club. In this post you'll find our CRISPR Cheat Sheet from @megearing's recent science club presentation about genome editing and CRISPR. We hope you find this cheat sheet useful!

Download a PDF version of the CRISPR Cheat Sheet here!

In this episode of the Addgene Podcast, Addgenie Kim de Mora sits down with Avital Bailen from the "OriginALS" iGEM team at Ben-Gurion University in Beer Sheva, Israel. Avital provides a brief description of the OriginALS iGEM project below and discusses more of what she hopes to learn from the iGEM competition in the podcast.

Before we dive into the interview, we’ll briefly introduce you to Kim and iGem. By the end of this interview, we hope you’ll have a good understanding of why iGEM is an important component of scientific training for many researchers and of how the goals of iGEM and Addgene intersect in concretely useful ways for iGEM participants.