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The vast majority of bacteria are undomesticated which limits the tools scientists can use to study them. For example, gene knockdown with CRISPR interference (CRISPRi) has been limited to lab-adapted bacteria because it has been challenging to introduce CRISPRi machinery into diverse bacteria species. Existing protocols can transfer CRISPRi into a single bacterial strain, such as a B. subtilis, or a narrow range of bacterial species, such as the human gut bacteria B. thetaiotaomicron, Mycobacterium, Pseudomonas, and E. coli. However, many non-model bacterial species lack genetic tools.

Addgene recently moved to our brand new location, with more space to grow and help scientists share resources in new ways. Along with a new location comes the need for new conference room names. The Addgenie’s favorite conference room naming scheme? Gene names! This is not surprising for Addgene. But the names we chose were not just any gene names. Now, we have meetings in rooms such as Groucho, Sonic Hedgehog, Sleeping Beauty, Cookie Monster, Spaghetti Squash, Tinman, and Bagpipe.

How does a gene get its name? Often times, a gene gets its name based on what happens to an organism when a gene/protein is depleted in a knockout experiment. Certain scientific communities have a little more leeway in what they can name a gene and many of the interesting ones come from the fly community. Not surprising, this is where most of our conference room names originated from.

Let’s take a look at some of the stories behind the names. We also have many plasmids in our repository that you can use to study these genes!

Since the beginning of our viral service in 2016, we’ve added many new tools to our inventory of ready-to-use viral vectors. Here are some of the AAV we have released so far in 2019. You can also browse our entire AAV inventory!

Our new AAVs include:

• pGP-AAV-syn-FLEX-jGCaMP7b-WPRE
• pAAV.hSyn-FLEX.iGABASnFR
• pAAV.hSyn-FLEX.iGABASnFR.F102G
• pAAV-Syn-Archon1-KGC-GFP-ER2
• pAAV-Syn-FLEX-rc [Archon1-KGC-GFP-ER2]
• pAAV-FLEX-tdTomato
• pAAV-GFAP104-mCherry
• pAAV-mDlx-NLS-mRuby2
• CAG-NLS-GFP
• pAAV-hSyn-mCherry

In this quarterly blog series, we’ll highlight a few of the new CRISPR plasmids available at Addgene. We will still periodically focus on specific CRISPR plasmid tools more in-depth, but we hope that this blog series will help you find new CRISPR tools for your research.

Every few months we highlight a subset of the new plasmids in the repository through our hot plasmids articles. These articles provide brief summaries of recent plasmid deposits and we hope they'll make it easier for you to find and use the plasmids you need. If you'd ever like to write about a recent plasmid deposit please sign up here.