Genome editing tools like transcription activator-like effector nucleases (TALENs) and zinc finger nucleases (ZFNs) revolutionized biomedical research. However, no tool has been as powerful as CRISPR-Cas9, which was discovered in the early 2010s.
Therapeutic applications of gene editing systems like these are still in the early stages of development, and further research is needed to fully understand their potential safety and efficacy benefits.
Researchers will increasingly rely on FDA’s guidance, thus increasing the need to conduct comprehensive preclinical safety studies to assess the potential risks and benefits of gene editing. In this light, technologies that help researchers create and customize assays will be increasingly critical.
Transposase-based approaches, such as seqWell’s Tagify UMI reagents, offer promise. Tagify can help researchers create QC methods that will ultimately promote the development of safer and more effective gene editing.
“We use seqWell’s custom Tagify reagent for our UDiTaS process. The batches are consistent and provide similar tagmentation profiles and editing results. The reactions can be scaled from 96 to 384 wells, and we’ve been able to process thousands of reactions over one year.”
– Georgia Giannoukos, Ph.D., Director of Next Generation Sequencing, Editas Medicine
In this webinar, Dr. Giannoukos highlighted how her team combined a custom Tagify reagent with their UDiTaS method to measure large deletions and inversions at the CEP290 editing site.
She also incorporated data demonstrating reproducibility of different Tagify batches. This webinar was transcribed into a blog if you prefer to read along.
Genome editing with technologies like CRISPR-Cas9 can be accompanied by off-target mutagenesis that are critical to measure and characterize. In general, it is effort-intensive, slow, and bias-prone to generate libraries of genomic DNA by fragmentation, size selection, end-repair and ligation prior to PCR. Library amplification is often followed by inefficient hybridization-based enrichment of sequences of interest to reduce sequencing cost.
In this poster, we describe the use of Tagify™ UMI Tn5 transposase-based reagents to circumvent these limitations.
The ExpressPlex™ Library Prep Kit is an innovative solution that can be used as an upstream QC method to verify the DNA sequence of the reagents used in gene editing labs prior to the gene editing process. This helps scientists ensure the safety of their final vector product.
“ExpressPlex is literally faster than Sanger. This changes everything for us. Basically, taking a two-day process to one day dramatically shortens time to data.” – Henry Chan, Ph.D., Synthetic Biology Lead, Octant Bio
This kit was designed for applications that focus on speed and volume versus high-depth reads. For example, if your lab is transitioning away from Sanger because you need to process at larger volumes, ExpressPlex can dramatically shorten time to data. The ExpressPlex workflow is automation-friendly.
Tagify™ is a versatile Tn5 transposase-based toolkit for custom NGS library prep.
Applications include:
“We’ve been asking for this. What’s great about Tagify is that it allows you to look at a specific place in the gene, and adapter concentration is taken care of. This system is really important because it provides us this opportunity to assess the consequences of gene editing in a semi-unbiased way. It shortens our process, makes it much more controlled, and lessens the amount of reagents we need to use.”
– Athea Vichas, Ph.D., Senior Principal Scientist of Gene Editing Analytical Development, Bristol Myers Squibb
The capacity and speed of modern DNA sequencing platforms has allowed sequencing to become an integral component of biomedical research and development pipelines. One key need emerging from this capability is for library tools that match sequencer technology with comparable workflow speed, throughput and efficiency.
In this video, we explore how transposase-based library technologies are well-suited for a number of challenging high-throughput workflows, and how innovations such as purePlex, ExpressPlex and Tagify are accelerating critical sequencing-based applications.
seqWell’s “workflow engineering” approach builds on our core reagent expertise to create streamlined products that deliver cutting-edge integrated workflows. Contact us for assistance with ordering the right product for your research.