We are a consortium of scientists working to improve gene editing tools in agriculturally relevant plants and animals.
The first project of the consortium is developing the data, models, and software to score CRISPR/Cas guide RNAs for a range of agriculturally relevant plants and animals. CRISPR/Cas gene editing uses guide RNAs to target specific genes. Guide RNAs (gRNAs) differ in their on-target and off-target editing efficiency. Current tools for scoring a guide’s effectiveness were trained on the human genome and do not work well in other organisms.
The scoring software will allow end users to score the outputs of any CRISPR design tool and will have a developer API to make it easy to incorporate scoring into new CRISPR guide design tools.
The software will use trained machine-learning models derived from experimental data contributed by consortium members. We are developing a set of clear molecular biology protocols that members can use to run experiments in new organisms and contribute data. We will analyze and publish on-target and off-target prediction models from data submitted by members.
If you want your organism included contact us about joining the consortium and contributing data. We will be publishing protocols on how to generate data and work with you to develop the training data that wil lbe processed into the machine learning models used by hte scorer.
Of Course! We will be extending authorship to teams that contribute the experimental data used to develop organism-specific models. If you want to contribute to writing code, contact us about joining and contributing in that way.
Yes. All data, code, and trained machine learning models will be made publically available under a CC0 public domain attribution.