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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:

• E. coli genome-wide CRISPR inhibition
• Covalent tethering of DNA template to Cas9
• SECURE base editors
• Nme2Cas9
• CRISPR interference in Candida albicans

Mutagenesis is a tool that both evolution and molecular biologists use to tinker with DNA. Making changes to a DNA sequence can help scientists identify and/or facilitate the evolution of new phenotypes, and forward genetics harnesses this at a large scale by screening diverse libraries of genetic variants. Several methods for generating mutant libraries exist, but none provide a means to continuously diversify all nucleotides within a user-defined genomic region. EvolvR, a CRISPR-Cas9 based targeted mutagenesis method developed by the Dueber Lab at Berkeley, provides a new approach for generating novel genetic variants in bacteria. Read on to learn about the key components of EvolvR and its potential applications.

This post was contributed by Greg Dingle, a software engineer with the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative.

We hereby announce the general availability of new a tool for CRISPR scientists––CrispyCrunch! CrispyCrunch is a web app that helps scientists design and analyze batches of CRISPR samples.

We invite you to jump in and try it out, or take a look at our live examples: experiment or analysis. In the rest of this article, we'll explain the thinking behind the tool, its key features, how it works, and how to use it.

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.

Sensitive and specific nucleic acid detection is crucial for clinical diagnostics, genotyping, and biotechnological advancements. Current methods of nucleic acid detection however, either lack the sensitivity or the specificity to detect nucleic acids at low concentrations and/or are too expensive, time-consuming, and complex to use outside of standard laboratories. Recently scientists have utilized CRISPR-Cas9 protein variants, Cas13, and Cas12a, to develop simple, portable, and inexpensive platforms to reliably detect nucleic acids at the atomolar level.