Scientists at the Center for Advanced Bioenergy and Bioproducts
Innovation (CABBI) have created CROPSR, the first open-source software
tool for genome-wide design and evaluation of guide RNA (gRNA) sequences
for CRISPRexperiments.

"CROPSR provides the scientific community with new methods and a new
workflow for performing CRISPR-Cas9 knockout experiments," said
developer Hans M??ller Paul, a molecular biologist and Ph.D. student with
co-author Matthew Hudson, Professor of Crop Sciences at the University
of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.

The genome-wide approach significantly shortens the time required to
design a CRISPR experiment, thereby reducing the challenge of working
with crops and accelerating gRNA sequence design, evaluation, and
validation. CROPSR can generate a database of usable CRISPR guide RNAs
for an entire crop Genome, a process that is computationally intensive
and time-consuming and usually requires several days. Now, researchers
could search for the genein their own database and see all the guides
available rather than searching for a targeted gene through an online
database, then using current tools to design separate guides for five
different locations and doing multiple rounds of experiments.

CROPSR: A New Tool to Accelerate Genetic Discoveries | Center for
Advanced Bioenergy & Bioproducts Innovation (cabbi.bio)
[cabbi.bio]