Site-directed mutagenesis (SDM) is one of the key tools researchers use to prove causation in molecular biology and genetics. It can be used to characterize the function of certain regions in a promoter or gene, as well as to study the effects of inactivating/activating mutations. In biomedical research, modeling patient mutations using SDM can help determine if a variant is causal for a given disease. CRISPR has made genomic SDM relatively straightforward, but plasmid-based SDM has lagged behind. While commercial kits are available for making small point mutations, large deletions/insertions require complicated, often costly in vitro assembly methods. A new method, REPLACR-mutagenesis, harnesses the power of bacterial recombineering to create insertions, deletions, and substitutions - at the same efficiency as Gibson Assembly and GeneArt cloning - but at a much lower cost. Read on to find out how to replace your SDM method with REPLACR (Recombineering of Ends of Linearized Plasmids After PCR).

Meetings often get a bad rap as annoying interruptions to our “real” work. However, a well-run meeting can have quite the opposite effect. A great meeting should produce collaboration - a sense of dialogue and community among participants, clarification - new and useful information, and invigoration - a renewed energy for continuing the project after leaving the meeting. Follow the tips below to learn how you can run a top-notch meeting.

Have you ever found yourself bamboozled by all of the different kinds of information on our plasmid pages? Well, to help make the most of these pages, we've written this post to guide you through them and make the best use of all the information provided by your colleagues.

At their most basic level, CRISPR/Cas9 genome editing systems use a non-specific endonuclease (Cas9 or closely related Cpf1) to cut the genome and a small RNA (gRNA) to guide this nuclease to a user-defined cut site. After reading this post, we hope you will be caught up on much of the major CRISPR lingo and will be able to describe the functions of the various CRISPR/Cas9 components. Please note that while this post is intended to provide a general overview of CRISPR components, new Cas9 variants are being discovered all the time and the requirements of these different systems can vary (for example, read our posts on Cpf1 and eSpCas9/SpCas9-HF1 for some of the interesting properties of these exciting new nuclease tools).

This post was updated on Dec 5, 2017.

CRISPR makes it easy to target multiple loci - a concept called multiplexing. Since CRISPR is such a robust system, editing or labeling efficiency doesn’t usually change when you add multiple gRNAs. Sound good? Addgene has many tools to help you multiplex - we’ll use mammalian plasmids to introduce you to some of your potential options and cloning methods, but please scroll down for plasmids suitable for other model systems, including E. coli, plants, Drosophila, and zebrafish!