Title
DNA-binding-domain fusions enhance the targeting range and precision of Cas9
UMMS Affiliation
Department of Molecular, Cell and Cancer Biology; Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Pharmacology; Program in Bioinformatics and Integrative Biology; Program in Molecular Medicine
Publication Date
2015-12
Document Type
Article
Disciplines
Bioinformatics | Cell Biology | Computational Biology | Genomics | Molecular Biology
Abstract
The CRISPR-Cas9 system is commonly used in biomedical research; however, the precision of Cas9 is suboptimal for applications that involve editing a large population of cells (for example, gene therapy). Variations on the standard Cas9 system have yielded improvements in the precision of targeted DNA cleavage, but they often restrict the range of targetable sequences. It remains unclear whether these variants can limit lesions to a single site in the human genome over a large cohort of treated cells. Here we show that by fusing a programmable DNA-binding domain (pDBD) to Cas9 and attenuating Cas9's inherent DNA-binding affinity, we were able to produce a Cas9-pDBD chimera with dramatically improved precision and an increased targeting range. Because the specificity and affinity of this framework can be easily tuned, Cas9-pDBDs provide a flexible system that can be tailored to achieve extremely precise genome editing at nearly any genomic locus.
Keywords
UMCCTS funding
DOI of Published Version
10.1038/nmeth.3624
Source
Nat Methods. 2015 Dec;12(12):1150-6. doi: 10.1038/nmeth.3624. Epub 2015 Oct 19. Link to article on publisher's site
Journal/Book/Conference Title
Nature methods
Related Resources
PubMed ID
26480473
Repository Citation
Bolukbasi MF, Gupta A, Oikemus S, Derr AG, Garber M, Brodsky MH, Zhu LJ, Wolfe SA. (2015). DNA-binding-domain fusions enhance the targeting range and precision of Cas9. Molecular, Cell and Cancer Biology Publications. https://doi.org/10.1038/nmeth.3624. Retrieved from https://escholarship.umassmed.edu/mccb_pubs/26