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Addgene Newsletter, June 2020
   

Dear scientists,

Over the last 16 years, Addgene has worked to make collaboration and sharing as unbiased as we aspire the world to be. Our mission is to change the world by bringing scientists together in sharing and collaboration. In these difficult times, we are even more committed to a diverse and open worldwide scientific community. Diversity is at the heart of Addgene and we believe that the best innovations and discoveries come from diverse teams. 

We support Black communities and condemn the systemic racism that has fueled the injustices in our country. We hope you will join us in amplifying Black voices, educating ourselves, and removing barriers that lead to racial inequalities.

Here are some resources that the Addgene team has found helpful:

-The Addgene Team
Plasmid sharing reaches 100 countries!

Just last week, we reached another milestone in our reagent sharing mission. Plasmids arrived in Tunisia for the first time, bringing our total reach to 100 countries.

ag_tunisia_flag_b@2x

Speeding COVID-19 research

Since our last newsletter in April, we’ve grown our collection of plasmids for COVID-19 research tremendously. We teamed up with Ginkgo Bioworks to distribute hundreds (and soon to be thousands) of plasmids expressing various tagged and untagged SARS-CoV-2 genes for mammalian, bacterial, and yeast expression. We’ve also worked with COVID-19 researchers to make many of these plasmids available to all scientists regardless if they’re from academic or industry organizations.

Find COVID-19 plasmids and resources
 Expanding the reach of plasmid sharing
to industry scientists

Why has reagent sharing been limited to academic labs? It shouldn’t be! We’re excited to grow our collection of plasmids available to industry and commercial scientists. We currently have  over 3,000 plasmids available to industry scientists, including SARS-CoV-2 plasmids, fluorescent protein plasmids, and more. Want to stay up-to-date on the latest offerings?

Subscribe to quarterly email updates on new plasmids available to industry.

If you have friends who are scientists in industry and would like to see their work get a boost from open science, share this news with them.
 Hey neuroscientist! Use the AAV Data Hub

Help us grow the AAV Data Hub by using it for your experiments and sharing your AAV data. First, what’s the AAV Data Hub? The Data Hub is an open platform for scientists using AAVs from Addgene’s viral service to share practical data about how they used the AAV and what worked. Our goal is to speed up your science by helping you find the right tool for your experiment.

If you’ve found useful data for your own research in the Data Hub, you know how much time that saves in planning out your experiments. We hope you’ll do the same and help out your colleagues and give more visibility to your work. P.S. - we also accept negative data with the proper controls.

Visit the AAV Data Hub, find and contribute data, and share your feedback with us.

Panel of three fluorescent microscopy images. The first is labelled with mCherry, the middle is labelled with mCherry, and the right is labelled with EYFP

Image credit: Huanhuan Li and Geoffrey Lau AAV-hSyn-DIO-hM3D(Gq)-mCherry  (left), Zafar Iqbal and Ying Li pAAV-GFAP-hM4D(Gi)-mCherry (AAV5) (middle), Kyle Puhger and Brian Wiltgen pAAV-CaMKIIa-hChR2(H134R)-EYFP (AAV9) (right).
 Hot plasmids

the hot plasmids icons has three flames horizontally in red, blue, and yellow, each with a plasmid in the middle

We regularly highlight a selection of cool new plasmids on the blog. Here are some featured plasmids from the past few months:

  • The iBAR CRISPR library is a human genome-wide CRISPR knockout library that incorporates four 6-basepair internal barcodes (iBARs) in each sgRNA.
  • By fusing a TALE protein to a fluorescent protein, Kyubong Jo’s lab created truncated TALE-FPs as alternatives to DNA staining dyes that can be used in high-salt buffers.
  • SPARC is a genetic tool from Thomas Clandinin’s lab that allows for the labeling of a subset of cells in a population to more easily visualize individual and non-overlapping cells.
  • Two new adenine base editors, ABE8 and ABE8e have recently been deposited by Nicole Gaudelli from Beam Therapeutics and David Liu from the Broad Institute. Both tools are evolved from ABE7, but each has unique differences.
Join us virtually!

Over the past months, we’ve been offering career webinars and we’re amping up the breadth of our educational webinars. If you’ve missed these or have webinar fatigue, you can still watch them later on our Webinars playlist on our YouTube channel.

What’s up next? 

List of Addgene's upcoming webinars include Building Better COVID-19 Tools Together: Using Scalable NGS to Accelerate Science, How to Choose the Right Next Lab or Workplace, and How Open Sharing Speeds Science

Building Better COVID-19 Tools Together: Using Scalable NGS to Accelerate Science

  • Hosted by Joseph Mellor, Seqwell, and Joanne Kamens, Addgene
  • June 11, 2020 12 PM EDT
  • Sign up here!
  • With the numerous plasmids being shared by the research community for #COVID19research, we acted fast to get these reagents available to scientists, through QC and distribution. Learn about our QC workflows using NGS in an upcoming webinar with seqWell.

How to Choose the Right Next Lab or Workplace

  • Hosted by Joanne Kamens
  • June 25, 2020 12:30 PM EDT
  • Sign up here!
  • For some reasons scientists don’t seem to see a lab choice as a major career decision. Yet, you will spend 4-7 years working for one person in a small group. When interviewing for any job, you are interviewing them as much as they are interviewing you. This presentation will give you practical tips for what to look for and how to find it when choosing a new lab or next place of work.

How Open Sharing Speeds Science

  • June 29, 2020 10 AM EDT
  • Sign up here!
  • Open Science accelerates research! This presentation will highlight examples from cutting edge science such as CRISPR and COVID-19 research and shows how open sharing has impacted research.
 New Plasmids 101 video series

Blugene is back, and spreading the word about plasmids! We teamed up with our mascot to bring you Plasmids 101, a new series of animated explainer videos designed as an introduction to plasmids for all levels of scientists. The first in the series, "What is a Plasmid?", is a great resource for teachers looking to explore some fundamentals of molecular biology with their students.

Plasmids 101 What is a Plasmid video thumbnail with play button

 
Packaging AAVs? Check out our new Made on Request AAV service

We’ve heard your requests and we’re excited to begin offering Made on Request AAV packaging. Instead of spending weeks preparing and titering your AAV, let us do this for you! This service will be available for AAV plasmids in our repository.

Learn more about Made on Request AAV and start your order
 

Help us bring you a better newsletter experience

What do you want to see more of in your upcoming newsletters? Please click on just one below. Your new customized newsletter will include highlights from your preferred topic. Don’t worry though, it will still include our major updates, so you won’t miss out on new Addgene projects to make your science faster. If you don’t select a preference, you will get a bit of everything!

Plasmid cloning

CRISPR

Viral vectors

A little bit of everything

We will now send this newsletter every two months (instead of the current schedule of every quarter). This way, you can be up-to-date on the latest tools and resources from Addgene. If you would like to continue receiving the newsletter, great! If you would rather not receive this newsletter (only) six times a year, you can opt out of your newsletter subscription using the link at the bottom of the email.

Text saying "$20 find plasmids"

June Savings from Addgene

To save $20 off your next order, use the following discount code during the checkout process:

1598343004
(Expires July 15, 2020)
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