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This article is based on an interview with Novartis researcher, Carrie Bhang.

The ClonTracer Library, deposited by Carrie Bhang, a research investigator in the In Vivo Pharmacology group at Novartis Oncology, is an exciting new tool that allows researchers to individually label millions of mammalian cells through lentiviral infection and to monitor their abundance and clonal dynamics over time using next generation sequencing (NGS). The library was developed when Carrie was a post-doc in Frank Stegmeier’s lab in Novartis Oncology. 

Every year, the Rare Genomics Institute sponsors a global competition for researchers working on rare diseases, offering them the chance to win some of the latest tools and technologies in life sciences research. The rare disease research community has certainly noticed: This year, the BeHEARD (Helping Empower and Accelerate Research Discoveries) Award attracted submissions from 99 universities and foundations in 21 countries.

“Over $600,000 worth of cutting-edge technologies were awarded to study 31 rare diseases,” said Claudia OuYang, BeHEARD Co-Director in a release. The research teams studying four of those rare diseases will receive plasmids from Addgene worth a total of $5000.

The Addgene Advisory Board consists of prominent members of the bioscience and tech transfer communities who help guide and promote Addgene in its mission to make research easier. Addgene is excited to announce that we’ve added John G. Doench, PhD to the Advisory Board. John Doench is Associate Director of the Genetic Perturbation Platform at the Broad Institute and has worked with many Addgenies to help improve the understanding, curation, and explanation of our CRISPR resources. We recently sat down with Dr. Doench for an interview to help further introduce him to the Addgene community.

As Eric Mendenhall of the University of Alabama in Huntsville explains it, a major goal in his laboratory is to understand the function of the non-coding portion of the genome. Mendenhall and Richard Myers of HudsonAlpha (where Mendenhall is also an adjunct faculty member) have together been working toward this goal for years as members of the ENCyclopedia of DNA Elements Project (ENCODE), an NIH-funded effort to define all of the functional elements in the human genome.

Hodaka Fujii, M.D., Ph.D., is an Associate Professor at Osaka University. The Fujii lab specializes in developing novel technologies to analyze molecular mechanisms of genome functions such as epigenetic regulation and transcription by using locus-specific chromatin immunoprecipitation (locus-specific ChIP). These methods consist of insertional chromatin immunoprecipitation (iChIP) and engineered DNA-binding molecule-mediated chromatin immunoprecipitation (enChIP), both developed in the lab. In June 2014, Dr. Fujii joined Addgene's Advisory Board. 

Addgene: Your lab has worked extensively with enChIP systems. Can you describe this technology and its advantages?

Fujii: In the last several years, my lab has been working on development of technologies for biochemical analysis of genome functions such as transcription and epigenetic regulation. To elucidate molecular mechanisms of regulation of genome functions, we need to identify molecules associated with specific genomic regions of interest in a non-biased manner. To achieve this goal, it is necessary to isolate specific genomic regions while retaining molecular interactions.