The Center for Advanced Genome Engineering (CAGE) provides expertise and infrastructure for St. Jude investigators to educate, assist, expedite and perform established and emerging genome engineering technologies, including the CRISPR-Cas9 technology. The CAGE has 3 main objectives:
The CAGE is a world-class genome-editing facility with the mission to provide low-cost, expeditious and collaborative genome-engineering services to St. Jude investigators. The CAGE boasts the expertise and infrastructure to educate, assist, expedite and perform established and emerging technologies.
The genome-engineering field is rapidly evolving. Accordingly, the CAGE spends time identifying, testing and evaluating the latest genome-editing tools, technologies and applications. The CAGE has worked with over 85 St. Jude investigators across 24 departments. Since the CAGE’s inception in 2017, CAGE scientists have enabled, collaborated on or published over 115 research papers in high-quality journals, including Cell, Nature, Nature Communications, Nature Genetics and Nature Neuroscience.
“Before I was even on payroll I started developing CRISPR lines…and by the time I landed in January, those lines were in a freezer and [CAGE] was saying, ‘OK, what’s next?’ No other place is going to afford you that.”
Andrew Kodani, Assistant Member
Services
Technology and advanced equipment
Over 235 preclinical animal models generated (including knockouts, conditional knockouts, large insertions, point mutations and large deletions)
Over 300 highly edited cell pools
Over 175 Cell Fitness (CelFi) assays
Assisted over 135 pooled CRISPR screens
Assisted over 135 pooled CRISPR screens
Processes over five thousand samples per week for targeted NGS for CRISPR-editing outcomes
Countless designed and validated gRNAs and donor templates
Dr. Shondra Pruett-Miller is the director of the Center for Advanced Genome Engineering (CAGE) at St. Jude. She earned her PhD in Cell and Molecular Biology from UT Southwestern Medical Center and was the founder and director of the Genome Engineering and iPSC Center (GEiC) at Washington University in St. Louis before founding the CAGE shared resource at St. Jude in 2017. Her interests in genome-editing technologies, disease modeling in iPSCs and development of preclinical models using CRISPR-Cas9 help shape the extensive resources the CAGE provides investigators at St. Jude.