University of Massachusetts Medical School Faculty Publications
UMMS Affiliation
RNA Therapeutics Institute; Program in Molecular Medicine; Department of Molecular, Cell and Cancer Biology; Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Pharmacology
Publication Date
2018-05-09
Document Type
Article Preprint
Disciplines
Amino Acids, Peptides, and Proteins | Cells | Enzymes and Coenzymes | Genetic Phenomena | Genetics and Genomics | Molecular Biology | Nucleic Acids, Nucleotides, and Nucleosides
Abstract
Background: The development of CRISPR genome editing has transformed biomedical research. Most applications reported thus far rely upon the Cas9 protein from Streptococcus pyogenes SF370 (SpyCas9). With many RNA guides, wild-type SpyCas9 can induce significant levels of unintended mutations at near-cognate sites, necessitating substantial efforts toward the development of strategies to minimize off-target activity. Although the genome-editing potential of thousands of other Cas9 orthologs remains largely untapped, it is not known how many will require similarly extensive engineering to achieve single-site accuracy within large (e.g. mammalian) genomes. In addition to its off-targeting propensity, SpyCas9 is encoded by a relatively large (~4.2 kb) open reading frame, limiting its utility in applications that require size-restricted delivery strategies such as adeno-associated virus vectors. In contrast, some genome-editing-validated Cas9 orthologs (e.g. from Staphylococcus aureus, Campylobacter jejuni, Geobacillus stearothermophilus and Neisseria meningitidis) are considerably smaller and therefore better suited for viral delivery.
Results: Here we show that wild-type NmeCas9, when programmed with guide sequences of natural length (24 nucleotides), exhibits a nearly complete absence of unintended editing in human cells, even when targeting sites that are prone to off-target activity with wildtype SpyCas9. We also validate at least six variant protospacer adjacent motifs (PAMs), in addition to the preferred consensus PAM (5′-N4GATT-3′), for NmeCas9 genome editing in human cells.
Conclusions: Our results show that NmeCas9 is a naturally high-fidelity genome editing enzyme and suggest that additional Cas9 orthologs may prove to exhibit similarly high accuracy, even without extensive engineering.
Keywords
molecular biology, NmeCas9, genome editing, Streptococcus pyogenes SF370, SpyCas9, Cas9, CRISPR, sgRNA, Protospacer adjacent motif, off-target, Neisseria meningitidis
Rights and Permissions
The copyright holder for this preprint (which was not peer-reviewed) is the author/funder. It is made available under a CC-BY-NC-ND 4.0 International license.
DOI of Published Version
10.1101/172650
Source
bioRxiv 172650; doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/172650. Link to preprint on bioRxiv service.
Journal/Book/Conference Title
bioRxiv
Repository Citation
Amrani, Nadia; Gao, Xin D.; Pengpeng Liu; Edraki, Alireza; Mir, Aamir; Ibraheim, Raed; Gupta, Ankit; Sasaki, Kanae E.; Wu, Tong; Fazzio, Thomas G.; Zhu, Lihua Julie; Wolfe, Scot A.; and Sontheimer, Erik J., "NmeCas9 is an intrinsically high-fidelity genome editing platform" (2018). University of Massachusetts Medical School Faculty Publications. 1559.
https://escholarship.umassmed.edu/faculty_pubs/1559
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 License.
Included in
Amino Acids, Peptides, and Proteins Commons, Cells Commons, Enzymes and Coenzymes Commons, Genetic Phenomena Commons, Genetics and Genomics Commons, Molecular Biology Commons, Nucleic Acids, Nucleotides, and Nucleosides Commons
Comments
Full author list omitted for brevity. For the full list of authors, see article.