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This post was contributed by the Open Repository of CRISPR Screens.

Imagine you’ve just discovered that your favorite gene was described in a CRISPR screen publication. You see this mentioned in the results section, but you had to dig through the supplemental files to see the actual data. Now you’re wondering if your favorite gene is included in other CRISPR screens and whether that data is useful for your research. Fortunately, there’s a growing open repository of CRISPR screen data that might be able to help you out.

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 (such as these recent blog posts on prime editing, IgnaviCas9, and Nanoblades), but we hope that this blog series will help you find more new CRISPR tools for your research!

This time:

• CRISPRi in Burkholderia
• Base editors
• CRISPR toolkit for epitope tagging
• Lentiviral capsid-based Cas9/gRNA ribonucleoprotein delivery
• Cytosine deaminase for RNA editing
  

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!

This time:

• GeneWeld vectors to create knock-ins
• CasX
• Drug inducible CRISPR/Cas9 activation
• E. coli genome-wide inhibition library
• CRISPR knockout libraries for cancer research

This post was contributed by Patrick Miller-Rhodes, a Ruth L. Kirschstein NRSA Predoctoral Fellow at University of Rochester Medical Center.

During development, complex genetic programs specify and assemble diverse arrays of neurons, forming the neuronal circuits that will later be refined through experience. However, studying the genetic underpinnings of these processes has been complicated by the lack of precise genetic tools for modulating gene expression in the central nervous system (CNS). To address this technological gap, a trio of recent papers describe the development of CRISPR activation (CRISPRa) tools for neuroscience, including transgenic mice, neuron-optimized viral vectors, and high-throughput screening approaches. Here, we’ll highlight these recent advancements and offer commentary on their application to neuroscience research.

While much of CRISPR research has focused on genome editing, numerous discoveries have been made using the Cas9 nuclease in the absence of genomic alterations. These studies utilize a catalytically inactive form of Cas9 known as dCas9 (Jinek et al., 2012). Like Cas9, dCas9 can bind to a specific DNA sequence via a targeting gRNA. But dCas9 does not cleave the DNA. Much of the research using dCas9 has focused on transcriptional activation using a fusion to a transcriptional activator such as VP64 (Gilbert et al., 2013), or repression of transcription through binding a promoter region to inhibit association of transcriptional activators (Qi et al., 2013). However, the fusion of dCas9 with a protein tag allows for the isolation of a genomic region of interest targeted by a gRNA.