Researchers at Sandia National Laboratories and the University of California Los Angeles recently released information on a collaborative project regarding the viral mechanisms of infection by creating screening libraries based on CRISPR (clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats) genome-editing technology.
The project is a part of the first-ever Cooperative Research and Development Agreement (CRADA) between Sandia and UCLA.
“The purpose of our CRADA is using an alternative method of library assembly to produce arrayed CRISPR libraries at a fraction of the cost of standard methods,” Sandia researcher Oscar Negrete, who is leading Sandia’s project to develop the libraries to screen for Zika virus, among others, said. “Instead of producing individual constructs one-by-one which by standard methods are relatively expensive and labor intensive, we will start out with a mixture of CRISPR constructs called a pooled library that is easy and inexpensive to produce, then separate or array the mixture into individual constructs using high-throughput robotic equipment. Using next-generation sequencing, we can then decode the constructs to build the arrayed formatted library.”
The new gene editing project was conducted under Sandia’s Laboratory Directed Research and Development program, which invests in projects with particularly high potential to make an impact on national security.
“Like a jar of jellybeans, a pooled CRISPR library is a complex mixture,” Negrete said. “An arrayed library on the other hand, is more like individually wrapped and labeled jellybeans. When you identify a particular CRISPR of interest from a pooled screen, you still have to run a deconvolution experiment to know what you have. In arrayed libraries, the CRISPR of interest is already labeled, therefore hit identification is much easier, quicker and cheaper.”