Open AccessSensitive and reliable evaluation of single-cut sgRNAs to restore dystrophin by a GFP-reporter assay
Author(s) -
Pin Lyu,
Kyung Whan Yoo,
Manish Kumar Yadav,
Anthony Atala,
Annemieke AartsmaRus,
Maaike van Putten,
Dongsheng Duan,
Biao Lü
Publication year - 2020
Publication title -
plos one
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.99
H-Index - 332
ISSN - 1932-6203
DOI - 10.1371/journal.pone.0239468
Subject(s) - dystrophin , subgenomic mrna , exon skipping , green fluorescent protein , biology , duchenne muscular dystrophy , indel , exon , computational biology , crispr , microbiology and biotechnology , genetics , gene , alternative splicing , genotype , single nucleotide polymorphism
Most Duchenne muscular dystrophy (DMD) cases are caused by deletions or duplications of one or more exons that disrupt the reading frame of DMD mRNA. Restoring the reading frame allows the production of partially functional dystrophin proteins, and result in less severe symptoms. Antisense oligonucleotide mediated exon skipping has been approved for DMD, but this strategy needs repeated treatment. CRISPR/Cas9 can also restore dystrophin reading frame. Although recent in vivo studies showed the efficacy of the single-cut reframing/exon skipping strategy, methods to find the most efficient single-cut sgRNAs for a specific mutation are lacking. Here we show that the insertion/deletion (INDEL) generating efficiency and the INDEL profiles both contribute to the reading frame restoring efficiency of a single-cut sgRNA, thus assays only examining INDEL frequency are not able to find the best sgRNAs. We therefore developed a GFP-reporter assay to evaluate single-cut reframing efficiency, reporting the combined effects of both aspects. We show that the GFP-reporter assay can reliably predict the performance of sgRNAs in myoblasts. This GFP-reporter assay makes it possible to efficiently and reliably find the most efficient single-cut sgRNA for restoring dystrophin expression.