Trends in CRISPR and SynBio Technologies

Addgenie Eric Perkins attended the recent Keystone Meeting "Precision Genome Engineering and Synthetic Biology". His reflections on the program are here. This was a great opportunity for Addgene to present our own data on plasmid deposits and distirbution for these fast moving fields. 

Addgene is a global nonprofit plasmid repository. Over 2,000 labs have deposited plasmids to Addgene and we distribute over 130,000 plasmids in 2014. Thus, we are in a unique position to observe and quantify how new technologies are being disseminated through the scientific community.

Data on CRISPR and synBio plasmid sharing

In a recent review on CRISPR technology, for example, the authors Patrick Hsu, Eric Lander, and Feng Zhang acknowledge the role of data and materials repositories in aiding the dramatic spread of the Cas9 technology: "The rapid adoption of the Cas9 technology was also greatly accelerated through a combination of open-source distributors such as Addgene, as well as a number of online user forums such as http://www.genome-engineering.org and http://www.egenome.org."

At the Keystone Meeting Eric presented a poster with data comparing Addgene global deposit and distribution trends for Zinc Finger, TALE, CRISPR, and SynBio plasmids over time. You can see these data in the slide share.

Addgenies are proud of the role we are playing in advancing this field and how we are able to support rapid progress in all areas of research. We welcome your comments... Where do you think these technologies are going? What is the next hot molecular biology technology? Have you deposited your plasmids yet?