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This post was contributed by guest blogger Courtney Price, the Education & Outreach Specialist for the Arabidopsis Biological Resource Center and the Center for Applied Plant Sciences at The Ohio State University.

Established in 1991, the Arabidopsis Biological Resource Center (ABRC) is one of two global stock centers for Arabidopsis thaliana (Arabidopsis). Our mission is to collect, preserve, reproduce and distribute seeds, DNA and other resources for Arabidopsis and related species. Located at The Ohio State University in Columbus, Ohio, ABRC ships more than 100,000 samples to researchers and educators in 60 countries each year.

Antibodies are a go-to tool for detecting a protein of interest in cells and tissues. Although antibody production is well established, it’s also a process that’s difficult for individual labs to complete. The nanobody based RANbody platform from the Sanes Lab overcomes this limitation and allows for the flexible design and small scale production of antibodies.

CRISPR genome editing has made it easier to create knockout alleles in a variety of species, including the standard laboratory mouse. It’s also made targeted insertions relatively simple in C. elegans and bacteria. But CRISPRing typical mouse models, including creating Cre-dependent conditional alleles, has remained a challenge. Enter Easi-CRISPR: a method that harnesses the power of ssDNA donor molecules for homology directed repair. Using long ssDNA donors, the Gurumurthy and Ohtsuka groups have obtained an average knock-in efficiency of 30-60%. This is much more favorable than previous methods yielding 1-10% knock-in. Read on to learn how you can make CRISPR mouse model generation easi-er!

In order to bind DNA, Cas9 and other CRISPR enzymes require a short PAM sequence adjacent to the targeted sequence at the locus of interest. SpCas9’s 3’ NGG PAM occurs frequently in GC-rich genomes, but a PAM is not always available near the locus you’d like to modify. To tackle the PAM problem, researchers have engineered alternative Cas9s binding distinct PAM sequences. Now, Hu et al., working in David Liu’s lab, have gone one step further, using directed evolution to create xCas9, an enzyme recognizing a broad range of PAMs like NG, GAA, and GAT, but also displaying increased editing specificity. We’re excited to learn more about xCas9 - here’s what we know so far!

Guest blogger Todd Waldman, Professor at Georgetown University, contributed to this post.

Adeno-associated viruses (AAVs) make fantastic gene delivery vehicles for episomal gene expression and are particularly useful for gene delivery to the nervous system. For many years they have also been used to enhance the efficiency of genome editing. In this post we'll walk through a variety of ways you can use AAVs to improve your genome editing experiments (with and without targeted nucleases).