[harleyk]

Really happy for Solugen's success and what this means for other biotechs seeking to augment traditional petromethods with enzymatic ones.

Can you help us better understand how you use CRISPR/Cas9 to mutate the protein? Your enzyme is proprietary, sounds like human protein, but mutated in certain positions prob to increase rate, but how do you use Cas9? I assume like other biotechs you purify this single protein using either E. coli or yeast with protein on plasmid. So why use Cas9 instead of site-directed mutagenesis?

[gchakr]

So, without going into too much detail the use of crispr/cas9 in our studies is even simpler than driving protein mutagenesis. We have been exploring CRISPRi has a mechanism to inhibit key promoter repressors of our gene of interest. We've found that we can affect affect specific protein abundances by changing the rates of both RNA synthesis and protein degradation, based on the two cross-kingdom control mechanisms CRISPRi and the N-end rule for protein stability.