Colors-Farm Ltd.
About
The company produces freshwater prawns and sells all-male Macrobrachium rosenbergii breeding stocks to southeaster Asia markets. The company is equipped with the knowledge to silence RNA by injecting post larva prawns and in the frame of CRISPR-IL gained the knowledge to inject M. rosenbergii eggs. The company produces M. rosenbergii year-round. A team of 10 people (including 2 PhD scientists) are engaged in the CRISPR-IL project.
Partner's Genome Editing vision
Colors envision that the editing tools developed during CRISPR-IL, will improve crustacean aquaculture in vivo at areas like: better and faster growth, disease resistance, and more. Stable stem cell lines (in vitro) that will be generated by the developed editing tools, will enable both fast and efficient diseases diagnostics and screening for anti-diseases new active agents. In addition, crustacean stable cell lines will make an efficient in vitro platform for designing additional targets for editing and will enlarge the scope of the projects.
Practically, edited embryos will be developed into new crustacean lines that can be marketed to Colors markets as new products in a very short time; these market opportunities will strengthen the company economically. Our achievements in cracking the obstacles in editing crustacean embryo genome, in parallel with the development of the GOGENOME CRISPR-IL machine, will enable us to become a world leader in developing novel aquaculture products using genome editing.
Partner's activity within the consortium
In the farm we generated a sustainable stock of females and routinely we are injecting their eggs at 2 cells embryos or prepare cells for electroporation. In collaboration with the group of Prof. Amir Sagi from BGU, we design and improve the protocols for genome editing tools in crustaceans (in vivo and in vitro). We use several guides for each gene among the lists of genes related to crustacean efficient growth, resistant to diseases, stem cells etc. and supply the editing results into the consortium’s rounds for the development of GOGENOME CRISPR-IL machine. Edited cellular genome and embryos genome serve as resources for the machine learning big data, and in addition, edited embryos are kept for continuous growth.
