This webinar covers recent advances in the use of CRISPR for generating animal models and cell lines.

Our first speaker, CB Gurumurthy of the University of Nebraska Medical Center, discusses the latest CRISPR strategies and tools available for animal genome editing, with a particular emphasis on strategies for increasing the homology-directed repair mechanism to enable insertion of longer sequences.

While CRISPR has shown very high promise for creating complete knockout (deletion) and subtle genetic changes (e.g., point mutation knock-ins), the generation of complex models, such as long cassette knock-ins and conditional knockout animal models, has remained a major challenge. Dr. Gurumurthy discusses advances in this area and will present examples of designing knock-in animal models.

Our second speaker, Shondra Miller the Director of the Center for Advanced Genome Engineering at St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital, shares lessons learned from more than 2,000 genome editing projects.

Although the CRISPR/Cas9 genome editing technique is conceptually simple and relatively efficient, creating and identifying correctly targeted clones can be quite laborious. The St. Jude team uses targeted deep sequencing as a tool to help increase the rates of genome editing through more rational design of CRISPR reagents.

Dr. Miller discusses how her team has used this approach to successfully validate more than 2,000 custom guide RNAs, create more than 400 custom modified cell lines, and create more than 150 custom-modified mouse models.