[Picture]Postdoctoral Researcher Hans Müller Paul, left, and Professor of Crop Sciences Matthew Hudson of the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, right, led the CROPSR team at the Center for Bioenergy and Bioproducts Innovation (CABBI). This open-source software tool makes it easier to design and evaluate CRISPR experiments and work with complex crop genomes.

software tool for genome-wide design and evaluation of guide RNA (gRNA) sequences for CRISPR/Cas9 experiments. This tool significantly shortens the time required to design a CRISPR experiment and reduces the challenge of working with complex crop genomes. It should accelerate bioenergy crop development as well as broader crop improvements and other gene-editing research.

Commercially viable biofuel crops are vital to reducing greenhouse gas emissions, and a new tool developed by the Center for Advanced Bioenergy and Bioproducts Innovation (CABBI) should accelerate their development -- as well as genetic editing advances overall.

"CROPSR provides the scientific community with new methods and a new workflow for performing CRISPR-Cas9 knockout experiments," said developer Hans Müller 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, reducing the challenge of working with crops and accelerating gRNA sequence design, evaluation, and validation, according to the study published in BMC Bioinformatics.