is a human fungal pathogen capable of causing life-threatening infections. The ability to edit the genome using CRISPR/Cas9 is an important tool investigators can leverage in their search for novel therapeutic targets. However, wild-type Cas9 requires an NGG protospacer adjacent motif (PAM), leaving many AT-rich regions of DNA inaccessible. A recently described near-PAMless CRISPR system that utilizes the SpRY Cas9 variant can target non-NGG PAM sequences. Using this system as a model, we developed CRISPR/SpRY. We tested our system by mutating and show that CRISPR/SpRY can utilize non-NGG PAM sequences in Our CRISPR/SpRY system will allow researchers to efficiently modify DNA that lacks NGG PAM sequences.... More
is a human fungal pathogen capable of causing life-threatening infections. The ability to edit the genome using CRISPR/Cas9 is an important tool investigators can leverage in their search for novel therapeutic targets. However, wild-type Cas9 requires an NGG protospacer adjacent motif (PAM), leaving many AT-rich regions of DNA inaccessible. A recently described near-PAMless CRISPR system that utilizes the SpRY Cas9 variant can target non-NGG PAM sequences. Using this system as a model, we developed CRISPR/SpRY. We tested our system by mutating and show that CRISPR/SpRY can utilize non-NGG PAM sequences in Our CRISPR/SpRY system will allow researchers to efficiently modify DNA that lacks NGG PAM sequences. Genetic modification of the human fungal pathogen allows us to better understand how fungi differ from humans at the molecular level and play essential roles in the development of therapeutics. CRISPR/Cas9-mediated genome editing systems can be used to introduce site-specific mutations to However, wild-type Cas9 is limited by the requirement of an NGG PAM site. CRISPR/SpRY targets a variety of different PAM sequences. We modified the CRISPR/Cas9 system using the CRISPR/SpRY as a guide. We tested CRISPR/SpRY on and show that our SpRY system can facilitate genome editing independent of an NGG PAM sequence, thus allowing the investigator to target AT-rich sequences. Our system will potentially enable mutation of the 125 genes which have been previously untargetable with CRISPR/Cas9. Additionally, our system will allow for precise targeting of many genomic locations that lack NGG PAM sites.
