发布: 2018年08月20日第8卷第16期 DOI: 10.21769/BioProtoc.2974 浏览次数: 7920
评审: David CisnerosRan ChenAnonymous reviewer(s)
Abstract
Diatoms are an ecologically important group of eukaryotic microalgae with properties that make them attractive for biotechnological applications such as biofuels, foods, cosmetics and pharmaceuticals. Phaeodactylum tricornutum is a model diatom with defined culture conditions, but routine genetic manipulations are hindered by a lack of simple and robust genetic tools. One obstacle to efficient engineering of P. tricornutum is that the current selection methods for P. tricornutum transformants depend on the use of a limited number of antibiotic resistance genes. An alternative and more cost-effective selection method would be to generate auxotrophic strains of P. tricornutum by knocking out key genes involved in amino acid biosynthesis, and using plasmid-based copies of the biosynthetic genes as selective markers. Previous work on gene knockouts in P. tricornutum used biolistic transformation to deliver CRISPR-Cas9 system into P. tricornutum. Biolistic transformation of non-replicating plasmids can cause undesired damage to P. tricornutum due to random integration of the transformed DNA into the genome. Subsequent curing of edited cells to prevent long-term overexpression of Cas9 is very difficult as there is currently no method to excise integrated plasmids. This protocol adapts a new method to deliver the Cas9 or TevCas9 system into P. tricornutum via conjugation of plasmids from a bacterial donor cell. The process involves: 1) design and insertion of a guideRNA targeting the P. tricornutum urease gene into a TevCas9 expression plasmid that also encodes a conjugative origin of transfer, 2) installation of this plasmid in Escherichia coli containing a plasmid (pTA-Mob) containing the conjugative machinery, 3) transfer of the TevCas9 expression plasmid into P. tricornutum by conjugation, 4) screening of ex-conjugants for urease knockouts using T7 Endonuclease I and phenotypic screening, and 5) curing of the plasmid from edited cells.
Keywords: CRISPR-Cas9 (CRISPR-Cas9)Background
The CRISPR system is a bacterial immune system that recognizes foreign DNA and leads to the activation of a targeted endonuclease, such as Cas9, which will generate a double strand break (DSB) in the invading DNA (Jinek et al., 2012; Wright et al., 2016). This system has been co-opted for genome editing applications whereby a single chimeric guide RNA (gRNA) can program Cas9 to target genes in model organisms, including in P. tricornutum (Daboussi et al., 2014). However, Cas9 generates blunt end DSB and the length of indels generated upon DNA repair is difficult to predict. Thus, in this study we used a dual endonuclease, TevCas9 to target the urease gene. TevCas9 is a dual endonuclease that is generated through the fusion of the I-TevI nuclease domain to Cas9 via a linker region (Wolfs et al., 2016). TevCas9 creates 33-36 bp deletions with non-compatible DNA ends (Wolfs et al., 2016). A previous study used transcription activator-like effector nucleases (TALENs) delivered by biolistic transformation (Weyman et al., 2015) to generate knockouts of the urease gene in P. tricornutum. To create an efficient system for gene editing in P. tricornutum, we adapted and optimized a plasmid-based system to deliver Cas9 or TevCas9 into P. tricornutum via conjugation from a bacterial donor cell (Karas et al., 2015). The new conjugation-based method to deliver Cas9 or TevCas9 described here is simpler, more efficient, and does not require specialized equipment for biolistic transformation (Slattery et al., 2018).
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文章信息
版权信息
© 2018 The Authors; exclusive licensee Bio-protocol LLC.
如何引用
Wang, H., Slattery, S. S., Karas, B. J. and Edgell, D. R. (2018). Delivery of the Cas9 or TevCas9 System into Phaeodactylum tricornutum via Conjugation of Plasmids from a Bacterial Donor. Bio-protocol 8(16): e2974. DOI: 10.21769/BioProtoc.2974.
分类
微生物学 > 微生物遗传学 > 诱/突变
分子生物学 > DNA > 诱/突变
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