Molecular Therapy: Nucleic Acids (Jun 2022)

Highly specific chimeric DNA-RNA-guided genome editing with enhanced CRISPR-Cas12a system

  • Hanseop Kim,
  • Wi-jae Lee,
  • Chan Hyoung Kim,
  • Yeounsun Oh,
  • Lee Wha Gwon,
  • Hyomin Lee,
  • Woojeung Song,
  • Junho K. Hur,
  • Kyung-Seob Lim,
  • Kang Jin Jeong,
  • Ki-Hoan Nam,
  • Young-Suk Won,
  • Kyeong-Ryoon Lee,
  • Youngjeon Lee,
  • Young-Hyun Kim,
  • Jae-Won Huh,
  • Bong-Hyun Jun,
  • Dong-Seok Lee,
  • Seung Hwan Lee

Journal volume & issue
Vol. 28
pp. 353 – 362

Abstract

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The clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats (CRISPR)-Cas12a system is composed of a Cas12a effector that acts as a DNA-cleaving endonuclease and a crispr RNA (crRNA) that guides the effector to the target DNA. It is considered a key molecule for inducing target-specific gene editing in various living systems. Here, we improved the efficiency and specificity of the CRISPR-Cas12a system through protein and crRNA engineering. In particular, to optimize the CRISPR-Cas12a system at the molecular level, we used a chimeric DNA-RNA guide chemically similar to crRNA to maximize target sequence specificity. Compared with the wild-type (wt)-Cas12a system, when using enhanced Cas12a system (en-Cas12a), the efficiency and target specificity improved on average by 2.58 and 2.77 times, respectively. In our study, when the chimeric DNA-RNA-guided en-Cas12a effector was used, the gene-editing efficiency and accuracy were simultaneously increased. These findings could contribute to highly accurate genome editing, such as human gene therapy, in the near future.

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