UMMS Affiliation
Gene Therapy Center; Department of Microbiology and Physiological Systems
Publication Date
2021-06-08
Document Type
Article
Disciplines
Congenital, Hereditary, and Neonatal Diseases and Abnormalities | Eye Diseases | Genetics and Genomics | Ophthalmology
Abstract
A missense mutation of collagen type VIII alpha 2 chain (COL8A2) gene leads to early-onset Fuchs' endothelial corneal dystrophy (FECD), which progressively impairs vision through the loss of corneal endothelial cells. We demonstrate that CRISPR/Cas9-based postnatal gene editing achieves structural and functional rescue in a mouse model of FECD. A single intraocular injection of an adenovirus encoding both the Cas9 gene and guide RNA (Ad-Cas9-Col8a2gRNA) efficiently knocked down mutant COL8A2 expression in corneal endothelial cells, prevented endothelial cell loss, and rescued corneal endothelium pumping function in adult Col8a2 mutant mice. There were no adverse sequelae on histology or electroretinography. Col8a2 start codon disruption represents a non-surgical strategy to prevent vision loss in early-onset FECD. As this demonstrates the ability of Ad-Cas9-gRNA to restore the phenotype in adult post-mitotic cells, this method may be widely applicable to adult-onset diseases, even in tissues affected with disorders of non-reproducing cells.
Keywords
Adenovirus, CRISPR/Cas9, Fuchs endothelial corneal dystrophy, genetics, genomics, human, mouse, off-target analysis of CRISPR/Cas9
Rights and Permissions
Copyright © 2021, Uehara et al. This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use and redistribution provided that the original author and source are credited.
DOI of Published Version
10.7554/eLife.55637
Source
Uehara H, Zhang X, Pereira F, Narendran S, Choi S, Bhuvanagiri S, Liu J, Ravi Kumar S, Bohner A, Carroll L, Archer B, Zhang Y, Liu W, Gao G, Ambati J, Jun AS, Ambati BK. Start codon disruption with CRISPR/Cas9 prevents murine Fuchs' endothelial corneal dystrophy. Elife. 2021 Jun 8;10:e55637. doi: 10.7554/eLife.55637. PMID: 34100716; PMCID: PMC8216720. Link to article on publisher's site
Journal/Book/Conference Title
eLife
Related Resources
PubMed ID
34100716
Repository Citation
Uehara H, Gao G, Ambati BK. (2021). Start codon disruption with CRISPR/Cas9 prevents murine Fuchs' endothelial corneal dystrophy. Open Access Publications by UMass Chan Authors. https://doi.org/10.7554/eLife.55637. Retrieved from https://escholarship.umassmed.edu/oapubs/4775
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.
Included in
Congenital, Hereditary, and Neonatal Diseases and Abnormalities Commons, Eye Diseases Commons, Genetics and Genomics Commons, Ophthalmology Commons
Comments
Full author list omitted for brevity. For the full list of authors, see article.