Reverse genetic approaches have allowed scientists to elucidate the effects of specific alterations in the genome on the cell or whole organism. For example, the expression of a particular gene can be attenuated by gene knockdown1,2 (partial reduction) or gene knockout3,4 (complete ablation) in order to determine the effect that this has on the function of the cell or on the development of the organism.
Gene knockout experiments have become easier since the introduction of sequence-specific programmable nucleases, such as zinc-finger nucleases (ZFNs) and transcription activator-like effector nucleases (TALENs). However, the relatively recent characterization of the clustered regularly interspersed short palindromic repeat (CRISPR)/Cas9 system has made it extremely easy for any laboratory around the world to perform gene knockout experiments. In essence, the CRISPR/Cas9 system consists of two essential components-a single guide RNA (sgRNA), which recognizes and binds via base complementarity to a specific sequence in the genome, and an endonuclease called Cas9. The aftermath of the specific binding and action of the sgRNA-Cas9 complex on genomic DNA is the double-strand cleavage of DNA. This, in turn, triggers the DNA damage response mechanism in the cell, which is subsequently repaired via the non-homologous end-joining (NHEJ) or homologous recombination (HR) pathways. Since the NHEJ repair mechanism (but not the HR mechanism) often results in the random insertion or deletion of nucleotides at the site of repair, resulting in insertion/deletion (indel) mutations, it may cause the reading frame of an exon to shift. This may then result in the knockout of the gene due to premature termination of translation and nonsense-mediated decay5,6,7.
Despite the convenience afforded by the introduction of the CRISPR/Cas9 system in knocking out a gene, the genotyping of clones of targeted cells remains a bottleneck, especially in a high-throughput setting8,9. Existing techniques either suffer major inherent limitations or are financially costly. For example, the SURVEYOR or T7E1 assay, which is an enzymatic assay that detects mismatches in DNA duplexes10, is not able to distinguish between wildtype clones and homozygous mutants (clones whose alleles are mutated identically), since these clones have identical alleles and thus do not present mismatches in their DNA sequence11. In addition, the use of Sanger sequencing, which is considered the gold standard in genotyping mutant clones, in a high-throughput setup is undesirable due to its high cost. Here, we present a detailed protocol of the fluorescent PCR-capillary gel electrophoresis technique, which can circumvent the limitations of the other existing genotyping techniques and is particularly useful in performing a high-throughput screen of nuclease-mediated knockout clones. This method is technically simple to perform and saves time and cost.