CRISPR/Cas Tools

This page describes a list of software platforms and bioinformatics tools built to facilitate the design of guide RNAs (gRNAs) for use with the CRISPR/Cas system.

The CRISPR/Cas (Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats/CRISPR associated nucleases) system was originally discovered to be an acquired immune response mechanism used by archaea and bacteria. It has since been adopted for use as a tool in the genetic engineering of higher organisms.

Designing an appropriate gRNA is an important element of genome editing with the CRISPR/Cas system. A gRNA can and at times does have unintended interactions ("off-targets") with other locations of the genome of interest. For a given candidate gRNA, these tools report its list of potential off-targets in the genome thereby allowing the designer to evaluate its suitability prior to embarking on any experiments.

Scientists have also begun exploring the mechanics of the CRISPR/Cas system and what governs how good, or active, a gRNA is at directing the Cas nuclease to a specific location of the genome of interest. As a result of this work, new methods of assessing a gRNA for its 'activity' have been published, and it is now best practice to consider both the unintended interactions of a gRNA as well as the predicted activity of a gRNA at the design stage.

Cas

Cas may mean:

List of minor characters in the Matrix series

Many of the characters listed here have names reflecting certain aspects of them, such as their status, personality or role.

Apoc

Apoc (played by Julian Arahanga) is a crew member of the Nebuchadnezzar in The Matrix.

Apoc drives Neo to his meeting with Morpheus, and assists Tank in locating Neo inside the Power Plant. He and Switch are portrayed as front-line soldiers while inside the Matrix, acting as "point" and "rear guard" in their escape from the Agents and police and laying down covering fire as they make their way into the sewers. Cypher murders Apoc by pulling his jack out of his head while Apoc is connected to the Matrix. In The Matrix Reloaded, Arahanga can be seen in one of the first establishing shots of Zion, as a machine operator who flashes quickly by the camera.

Captain Ballard

Captain Ballard (played by Roy Jones Jr.), was the captain of the Zion hovercraft Caduceus in the film The Matrix Reloaded and the video game Enter the Matrix. During the Captain's meeting in Reloaded, Ballard volunteers to stay behind during the massive recall of all hovercrafts to Zion in order to await a message from The Oracle. As Ballard stayed behind, he was eventually contacted and challenged to a fight by Seraph. Shortly after the fight, Ballard met with the Oracle to retrieve her message. The crew of the Caduceus eventually made it back to Zion and gave the message to Neo.

Caspians

Caspians (Greek: Κάσπιοι Kaspioi, Aramaic: kspy, Georgian: კასპიელები kaspielebiʿ, Classical Armenian: կասպք kaspkʿ, Persian: کاسپی ها ‎‎) is the English version of a Greek ethnonym mentioned twice by Herodotus among the satrapies of Darius and applied by Strabo to the ancient people dwelling along the southern and southwestern shores of the Caspian Sea, in the region which was called Caspiane after them. The name is not attested in Old Iranian.

The Caspians have generally been regarded as a pre-Indo-European people; they have been identified by Ernst Herzfeld with the Kassites, who spoke a language without an identified relationship to any other known language and whose origins have long been the subject of debate.

However onomastic evidence bearing on this point has been discovered in Aramaic papyri from Egypt published by P. Grelot, in which several of the Caspian names that are mentioned— and identified under the gentilic כספי kaspai— are in part, etymologically Iranic. The Caspians of the Egyptian papyri must therefore be considered either an Iranic people or strongly under Iranic cultural influence.

Tool

A tool is any physical item that can be used to achieve a goal, especially if the item is not consumed in the process. Tool use by humans dates back millions of years, and other animals are also known to employ simple tools.

Tools that are used in particular fields or activities may have different designations such as "instrument", "utensil", "implement", "machine", "device," or "apparatus". The set of tools needed to achieve a goal is "equipment". The knowledge of constructing, obtaining and using tools is technology.

History

Anthropologists believe that the use of tools was an important step in the evolution of mankind. Because tools are used extensively by both humans and wild chimpanzees, it is widely assumed that the first routine use of tools took place prior to the divergence between the two species. These early tools, however, were likely made of perishable materials such as sticks, or consisted of unmodified stones that cannot be distinguished from other stones as tools.

Stone artifacts only date back to about 2.5 million years ago. However, a 2010 study suggests the hominin species Australopithecus afarensis ate meat by carving animal carcasses with stone implements. This finding pushes back the earliest known use of stone tools among hominins to about 3.4 million years ago.