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Therapeutic genome editing of an aberrant splice site in β-thalassemia by CRISPR/Cas9 with multiple sgRNAs

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Therapeutic genome editing of an aberrant splice site in β-thalassemia by CRISPR/Cas9 with multiple sgRNAs

Fei Yang
Shuqian Xu
Chao Huang
Zhiqiang Shao
Yuefen Hu
Yang Yang
Yongrong Lai
Qing Ke
Dan Liang
Yuxuan Wu
Genes & Diseases第11卷, 第1期pp.15-18纸质出版 2024-01-01在线发表 2023-03-24
210504

Genetic mutations cause aberrant splicing, one of the important molecular mechanisms in human diseases. IVS2-654, a mutation causing aberrant splicing of b-globin premRNA and contributing to β-globin deficiency, is one of the most common diseases in Southeast Asia and China. In our previous work, we found a TTTV protospacer adjacent motif (PAM) by the Cas12a system and the editing efficiency of IVS2-654 C > T achieving 76.7%. Here, we present that the efficiency and persistence of IVS2-654 C > T can be rescued through electroporation of Cas9 ribonucleoprotein (RNPs) with multiple single guide RNAs (sgRNAs) into hematopoietic stem and progenitor cells (HSPCs), introducing high-efficiency indels of pre-mRNA with the aberrant splice sites disrupted and restoring normal β-globin expression. Notably, we found those multiple adjacent sgRNAs could induce large fragment deletion rather than regular small indels, leading to normal coding sequence (CDS) region and directly restoring the β-globin gene function of IVS2-654 C > T without off-target effects. Our strategies could directly rescue the β-globin gene function of IVS2-654 C > T with a higher restoration by multiple sgRNAs co-delivered.

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