Report from GARNet/OpenPlant CRISPR Workshop (7-8th September 2015)

GARNet and OpenPlant were delighted to invite over 140 attendees to the CRISPR-Cas workshop held at the John Innes Centre at the start of September 2015. This workshop was designed to introduce CRISPR technology and highlight what might be possible with this transformative technology. A full report from the meeting can be found on the GARNet blog.

Speakers on the first day of the workshop were:

• Jim Haseloff (University of Cambridge)
• Nicola Patron (The Sainsbury Laboratory)
• Holger Puchta (Karlsruhe Institute of Technology)
• Bing Yang (Iowa State University)
• Laurence Tomlinson (The Sainsbury Laboratory)
• Bernardo Pollak (University of Cambridge)
• Vladimir Nekrasov (The Sainsbury Laboratory)
• Oleg Raitskin (The Sainsbury Laboratory)
• Edward Perello (Desktop Genetics)

On Day Two of the workshop ~20 researchers learned more detail about the basic principles for use of CRISPR-Cas technology. The workshop was split into the following parts: 1. Designing guide RNAs. 2. Making constructs using the MoCLo system. 3. Screening trangenic plants.

This workshop was run by Dr Nicola Patron of The Sainsbury Laboratory and she is happy to share her notes from that session, which can be downloaded from here. These will hopefully give some guidance to anyone embarking on use of CRISPR-Cas for the first time.