CRISPR-Cas9 which stands for "clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats-associated protein 9" was first discovered as part of studies on bacterial adaptive immunity1,2. Today, CRISPR/Cas9 has become the most recognized tool for programmable gene editing and different iterations of the system have been developed to allow transcriptional and epigenetic modulations3. This technology enables the highly precise genetic manipulation of almost any sequence of DNA4.
The essential components of any CRISPR gene editing are a customizable guide RNA sequence and the Cas9 nuclease5. The RNA guide binds to the target-complementary sequence in the DNA, directing the Cas9 nuclease to perform a double-strand break at a specific point in the genome3,4. The resulting cleavage site is then repaired by non-homologous end-joining (NHEJ) or homology-directed repair (HDR), with the consequent introduction of changes in the targeted DNA sequence5.
CRISPR/Cas9 based gene editing is easy to use, and relatively inexpensive compared to previous gene-editing techniques and it has been proven to be both efficient and robust in a multiplicity of systems2,4,5. Yet, the system presents some limitations. The constitutive expression of Cas9 has often been shown to result in an increased number of off-targets and high cell toxicity4,6,7,8. Additionally, the constitutive targeting of essential and cell survival genes by Cas9 takes away from its ability to perform certain types of functional studies such as kinetic studies of cell death7.
Different inducible or conditionally controlled CRISPR-Cas9 tools have been developed to address those issues6, such as Tet-ON and Tet-Off9; site-specific recombination10; chemically-induced proximity11; intein dependent splicing3; and 4-Hydroxytamoxifen Estrogen Receptor (ER) based nuclear localization systems12. In general, most of these procedures (intein splicing and chemically induced proximity split systems) do not offer reversible control, present a very slow kinetic response to drug treatment (Tet-On/Off system), or are not amenable to high-throughput manipulation6.
To address these limitations we developed a novel toolkit that not only provides fast and robust temporal-controlled gene editing but also ensures traceability, tunability, and amenability to high throughput gene manipulation. This novel technology can be used in cell lines, organoids, and animal models. Our system is based on an engineered domain, when fused to Cas9, it induces its rapid degradation. However, it can be rapidly stabilized with a highly selective, non-toxic, cell-permeable small molecule. More specifically, we engineered the human FKBP12 mutant "destabilizing domain" (DD) to Cas9, marking Cas9 for rapid and constitutive degradation via the ubiquitin-proteasome system when expressed in mammalian cells13. The DD synthetic ligand, Shield-1 can stabilize DD conformation, thereby preventing the degradation of proteins fused to DD (such as Cas9) in a very efficient manner, and with a fast kinetic response14,15. Of note, Shield-1 binds with three orders of magnitude tighter to the mutant FKBP12 than to its wild-type counterpart14.
The DD-Cas9/Shield-1 pair can be used to study the systematic identification and characterization of essential genes in cultured cells and animal models as we previously showed by conditionally targeting the CypD gene, which plays an important role in the metabolism of mitochondria; EGFR, a key player in oncogenic transformation; and Tp53, a central gene in DNA damage response. In addition to temporally and conditionally controlled gene editing, another advantage of the method is that the stabilization of DD-Cas9 is independent of its transcription. This feature enables co-expression, under the same promoter, of traceable markers as well as recombinases, such as the estrogen receptor-dependent recombinase, CREER. In this work, we show how our method can be successfully used in vitro, to conditionally target for example, DNA replication gene, RPA3.