Rapid and tunable method to temporally control gene editing based on conditional Cas9 stabilization

TLDR

The CRISPR/Cas9 system is a powerful tool for studying gene function. The study presents a method for temporally controlling CRISPR/Cas9 activity through conditional Cas9 destabilization to enable systematic characterization of essential genes and their interactions. The method fuses an FKBP12‑derived destabilizing domain to Cas9, allowing ligand‑induced stabilization and temporal control, and can be co‑expressed from a single promoter with other genes, including inducible Cre‑ER T2, for independent allele manipulation. The authors demonstrate that DD‑Cas9 provides ligand‑dependent, temporally controlled gene editing.

Abstract

Abstract The CRISPR/Cas9 system is a powerful tool for studying gene function. Here, we describe a method that allows temporal control of CRISPR/Cas9 activity based on conditional Cas9 destabilization. We demonstrate that fusing an FKBP12-derived destabilizing domain to Cas9 (DD-Cas9) enables conditional Cas9 expression and temporal control of gene editing in the presence of an FKBP12 synthetic ligand. This system can be easily adapted to co-express, from the same promoter, DD-Cas9 with any other gene of interest without co-modulation of the latter. In particular, when co-expressed with inducible Cre-ER T2 , our system enables parallel, independent manipulation of alleles targeted by Cas9 and traditional recombinase with single-cell specificity. We anticipate this platform will be used for the systematic characterization and identification of essential genes, as well as the investigation of the interactions between functional genes.