癌症生物学

Programmable RNA-guided nucleases based on CRISPR (clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats)-Cas (CRISPR-associated protein) systems have been applied to various type of cells as powerful genome editing tools. By using activation-induced cytidine deaminase (AID) in place of the nuclease activity of the CRISPR/Cas9 system, we have developed a genome editing tool for targeted nucleotide substitution (C to T or G to A) without donor DNA template (Figure 1; Nishida et al., 2016). Here we describe the detailed method for Target-AID to perform programmable point mutagenesis in the genome of mammalian cells. A specific method for targeting the hypoxanthine-guanine phosphoribosyltransferase (HPRT) gene in Chinese Hamster Ovary (CHO) cell was described here as an example, while this method principally should be applicable to any gene of interest in a wide range of cell types.


Figure 1. Schematic illustration for Target-AID and its targetable site. In a guide-RNA (gRNA)-dependent manner, PmCDA1 fused to nCas9 (D10A) via a linker performs programmable cytidine mutagenesis around -21 to -16 positions relative to PAM sequence on the non-complementary strand in mammalian cells. The targetable site was determined based on the efficient base substitution (> 20%) observed in the previous work.

The DNA molecule is exposed to a multitude of damaging agents that can compromise its integrity: single (SSB) and double strand breaks (DSB), intra- or inter-strand crosslinks, base loss or modification, etc. Many different DNA repair pathways coexist in the cell to ensure the stability of the DNA molecule. The nature of the DNA lesion will determine which set of proteins are needed to reconstitute the intact double stranded DNA molecule. Multiple and sequential enzymatic activities are required and the proteins responsible for those activities not only need to find the lesion to be repaired among the millions and millions of intact base pairs that form the genomic DNA but their activities have to be orchestrated to avoid the accumulation of toxic repair intermediates. For example, in the repair of Single Strand Breaks (SSB) the proteins PARP1, XRCC1, Polymerase Beta and Ligase III will be required and their activities coordinated to ensure the correct repair of the damage.

Furthermore, the DNA is not free in the nucleus but organized in the chromatin with different compaction levels. DNA repair proteins have therefore to deal with this nuclear organization to ensure an efficient DNA repair. A way to study the distribution of DNA repair proteins in the nucleus after damage induction is the use of the laser microirradiation with which a particular type of DNA damage can be induced in a localized region of the cell nucleus. The wavelength and the intensity of the laser used will determine the predominant type of damage that is induced. It is important to note that other lesions can also be generated at the microirradiated site.

Living cells transfected with the fluorescent protein XRCC1-GFP are micro-irradiated under a confocal microscope and the kinetics of recruitment of the fluorescent protein is followed during 1 min. In our protocol the 405 nm laser is used to induce SSB.