Abstract: The presently disclosed subject matter provides compositions and methods for the expression of CRISPR guide RNAs using the H1 promoter. In particular, compositions and methods are provided for the use of the H1 promoter to express CRISPR guide RNA (gRNA) with altered specificity of the 5? nucleotide, as well as use of the H1 promoter sequence as a bidirectional promoter to express Cas9 nuclease and the gRNA simultaneously. Compositions and methods are also provided for the expression and regulation of gRNA expression in vivo through the use of RNA ribozymes and regulatable aptazymes.

Abstract: Various embodiments are disclosed for accelerating computations using field programmable gate arrays (FPGA). Various tree traversal techniques, architectures, and hardware implementations are disclosed. Various disclosed embodiments comprise hybrid architectures comprising a central processing unit (CPU), a graphics processor unit (GPU), a field programmable gate array (FPGA), and variations or combinations thereof, to implement raytracing techniques. Additional disclosed embodiments comprise depth-breadth search tree tracing techniques, blocking tree branch traversal techniques to avoid data explosion, compact data structure representations for ray and node representations, and multiplexed processing of multiple rays in a programming element (PE) to leverage pipeline bubble.