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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!

Last Wednesday we worked with the Harvard GSAS Science Policy Group to organize a Minisymposium on Reproducibility. The minisymposium focused on solutions to reproducibility issues in the biological sciences and featured speakers from academia, industry, nonprofits, and publishing. The livestream video from the event can be found below along with a description of the program beneath it. You can jump to the different time stamps in the description to watch any sections you’re particularly interested in, but I’d recommend watching the whole livestream for a more holistic understand of reproducibility issues and their potential solutions.

Prior to this event, I gave my own talk on reproducibility at Addgene and here I summarize what I learned both in preparation for my talk and at the minisymposium. You can find a variety of additional resources and information about organizations promoting reproducibility in this booklet (which was also handed out at the event).