Ohde et al report the first successful development and use of CRISPR/Cas9 in the basally branching insect Thermobia domestica. By co-injecting Cas9 nuclease with sgRNA targeting a T. domestica ortholog of the Drosophila melanogaster white gene (Td-w), the authors created […]
editing
CRISPR to go – a guide to gene editing Tephritid flies at remote facilities
Sim et al. (2018) recently published a paper in Insect Molecular Biology describing CRISPR/Cas 9 methods for gene editing in three genera of Tephritid fruit flies: Anastrepha, Bactrocera, and Ceratitis. CRISPR/Cas9 allows for targeted gene editing through homology driven repair […]
New SpCas9 With Expanded Target Range
Nishimasu et al. (2018) recently reported in Science on their finds related to a new SpCas9 modification referred as SpCas9-NG that has an expanded target range. The authors directionally mutated the wild-type SpCas9 enzyme to achieve its relaxed preferences to the […]
Precise and Efficient Nucleotide Substitution Via Noncanonical Homology-directed Repair.
In a recent paper in Genome Research Nakajima et al. 2018 propose an efficient gene editing strategy by nucleotide substitution that overcomes three general problems associated with current methods. First, indels caused by the traditional Cas9-induced Double Strand Breaks (DSB), […]
Optimizing Gene Drive Performance
Roggenkamp et al 2018, in a recent publication in G3:Genes, Genomes, Genetics provide an in-depth analysis of potential ways that gene drive mechanisms can be regulated by targeting four conserved elements which would be found in any CRISPR/Cas9 based gene […]
Gene Drives and the Potential Benefits of CRISPR Technology
Marshall and Akbari review a range of different proposed gene drive systems and discuss ways in which CRISPR may be useful in engineering them in a recent issue of ACS Chemical Biology. In the years since translocations were first suggested […]
The Latest on CRISPR/Cas9: A Collection of Papers
A recent issue of ACS Chemical Biology includes some 25 articles on various aspects of CRISPR/Cas systems – mechanisms and applications. While not all of the articles will be of direct interest to insect biologists, many are and anyone working […]
A Protocol for the Highly Efficient Generation of Stable Mosquito Knockout Lines Using CRISPR/Cas9
In their recent paper in G3: Genes|Genomes|Genetics, Li et al. describe a highly efficient protocol for the generation of stable knockout lines using CRISPR/Cas9. The ability of effectively targeting and disrupting gene function is essential for gene functional analysis studies […]
DNA-guided Genome Editing Proves Unrepeatable
Earlier claims this year by Gao et al. (2016) that a new gene editing system unrelated to Cas9 and based on a DNA-guided Argonaute protein from the haloalkaliphilic archaebacterium Natronobacterium gregoryi, NgAgo, appear now to be unrepeatable despite a sizable […]
Editing Methylation States
Editing DNA nucleotide sequences has become common place but using the programmability of RNA-guided endonucleases to affect other changes to the genome are less developed although their potential for making such changes is quite high. Liu et al. report on […]