ISAAA March 13, 2024

Photo Source: Center for Advanced Bioenergy and Bioproducts Innovation (CABBI)

Researchers at the Center for Advanced Bioenergy and Bioproducts Innovation (CABBI) are further improving CRISPR's versatility and ease of use with a newly developed tool called CRISPR-COPIES, or COmputational Pipeline for the Identification of CRISPR-Cas-facilitated intEgration Sites. CRISPR-COPIES can identify genome-wide neutral integration sites for most bacterial and fungal genomes within two to three minutes.

In their paper published in Nucleic Acids Research, the researchers showed the versatility and scalability of CRISPR-COPIES by characterizing integration sites in three diverse species: Cupriavidus necator, Saccharomyces cerevisiae, and HEK 293T cells. They used integration sites found by CRISPR-COPIES to engineer cells with increased production of 5-aminolevulinic acid, a valuable biochemical that has applications in agriculture and the food industry. The team also created a user-friendly web interface for CRISPR-COPIES that can be accessed by researchers.

For engineering crops, CRISPR-COPIES can be used to increase biomass yields, pest resistance, and/or environmental resilience. For converting biomass to valuable chemicals — for instance, by using the yeast S. cerevisiae — CRISPR-COPIES can be used to engineer cells with significantly greater yields.

For more details, read the news release on the CABBI website.