Grant: Idea to Innovation

The rapidly expanding discipline of Genetic editing has been introduced to the general public through some of the flashier or controversial applications including efforts to clone the woolly mammoth or the unnecessary alteration of the human 24nome before birth. However, in more mainstream applications genomic editing has entered nearly every aspect of biology research and medicine including clinical trials to correct devastating diseases, enabled the altering of mosquitoes' DNA to combat the malaria parasite, and has the potential to help coral become more resistant to rising water temperatures. With seemingly endless beneficial applications for genetic editing, a commercial need has developed for efficient and high-throughput detection of these edits. This need is based on the low success rates of genetic edits that results in the need for labs or companies to screen often hundreds of samples to identify, select or quantify the genetic editing. Techniques currently available to determine which cells have been affected by genome editing are either inefficient, labor-intensive, prohibitively expensive, or are not conducive to high-throughput capabilities required by industry and scientists. This proposal will set the groundwork for a new high-throughput and efficient genotyping, called the Mixed Melt Discrimination (MMD).