Reclone Community Meeting on Jun 18th at 14:00 UTC ✨

Events
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Hello Reclone Community :wave:

You’re all invited to our Community Meeting later this month, on 2025-06-18T14:00:00Z. This will be a slightly longer session than usual (up to 1.5h) as we have two talks scheduled!

For our first talk, we will hear from Florian Hahn (Grow More Foundation) and Birhan Addisie Abate (International Center for Genetic Engineering and Biotechnology), presenting about Providing new tools for Plant Scientists in the Global South - The ENABLE Gene Editing Toolkit.

Access to modern technologies in plant breeding is crucial for providing food security. However, there is still a disconnect between the regions with the highest scientific output in Plant Sciences and the regions where the issue of food security is specifically pressing. Crucially, the Global South needs access to BioTech knowledge and technologies to ensure food supply in developing countries. The Grow More Foundation wants to serve as a bridge between scientific advances and agricultural applications. Our aim is to enable plant scientists in developing countries with the resources to apply agricultural advancements in their own countries and to enable others to independently and sustainably, develop successful strategies to face agricultural challenges and implement teaching programs.

Gene Editing technologies, specifically CRISPR/Cas9 have transformed Plant Sciences over the last 15 years. These technologies can have a large impact on food security but are heavily underused currently in most countries of the Global South due to lack of access to resources and training. Here, we describe our efforts in creating and validating the CRISPR/Cas9 based ENABLE Gene Editing kit, an easy to use molecular toolkit to enable gene editing in crops, in collaboration with our partners at Beneficial Bio. We will discuss the idea of the toolkit as well as the testing phase in planta and initial in person testing with a cohort of African scientists during a workshop in Ethiopia.

Stay tuned and we’ll post the title and abstract to our second talk later on this week, but we can let you know for now that the second speaker will be with Luis Gabriel Brieba de Castro (Cinvestav). For those who follow his work, it’ll focus on his upcoming RPA paper.

:arrow_right: Join us via Zoom: Launch Meeting - Zoom

Feel free to invite and share news to others in your networks who might be interested :star_struck:

You can also check our previous meetings at Events – Reagent Collaboration Network or via the Reclone YouTube channel.
Likewise, you can see the Upcoming Events on the Reclone Calendar, tell us you’re Interested/Going, and add these to your own calendar.

See you all at the meeting!

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As teased, for our second talk with Luis Gabriel Brieba de Castro (Cinvestav), he’ll be presenting his recent work on An Open Access Recombinase Polymerase Amplification (RPA):

Recombinase Polymerase Amplification (RPA) facilitates rapid, exponential, isothermal nucleic acid amplification without the need for specialized equipment. Since its development in 2006, RPA has been widely applied to detect hundreds of RNA and DNA targets, spanning point-of-care diagnostics and agricultural uses. However, its reliance on pre-assembled commercial kits limits flexibility for customization. In this study, we introduce an open-source alternative to commercial RPA kits, utilizing purified, heterologously expressed proteins to circumvent the fixed molar ratios of proprietary systems. Our method incorporates enzymes from the bacteriophage T4 homologous recombination pathway—single-stranded binding protein (gp32), recombinase (UvsX), and mediator (UvsY)—along with Moloney murine leukemia virus (MMLV) reverse transcriptase with enhanced thermal stability, and Bst and Bsu DNA polymerases. We assessed the impact of buffer composition, reagent concentrations, and reaction temperature using synthetic SARS-CoV-2 genes. Notably, gp32 concentration and buffer composition emerged as critical factors in optimizing RPA performance. Using this tailored system, we demonstrated successful detection of the SARS-CoV-2 N gene on lateral flow devices (LFD) with cDNA from eight clinical samples, achieving results consistent with RT-PCR. This open-source RPA platform provides an adaptable and cost-effective alternative for researchers, enabling the exploration of diverse experimental conditions and offering a viable solution for those without access to commercial kits.

:link: It’s great to see that he has been able to use some parts from our Research in Diagnostics Toolkit, which he procured from Addgene, to help support his research here!

Luis’ talk will follow Florian’s and Birhan’s, hence the slightly longer Community Meeting than usual, so we hope you’ll be able to join us for a little longer to hear both these exciting talks!

:arrow_up: As always, see the details and joining links in the first post above!

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Hi Everyone :wave:

Looking forward to seeing you all 2025-06-18T14:00:00Z to hear from Florian, Birhan, and Luis talk about two open and frugal toolkits that can provide viable, alternative solutions to enable researchers to carry out their work in low-resource contexts. Tune in if this sounds like it’ll be helpful to you or people you know!

:arrow_up: See the joining links in the first post above!