Project description:Deep mutational scanning is a powerful method for exploring the mutational fitness landscape of proteins. Its adaptation to anti-CRISPR proteins, which are natural CRISPR-Cas inhibitors and key players in the co-evolution of microbes and phages, facilitates their characterization and optimization. Here, we developed a robust anti-CRISPR deep mutational scanning pipeline in Escherichia coli that combines synthetic gene circuits based on CRISPR interference with flow cytometry coupled sequencing and mathematical modeling. Using this pipeline, we characterized comprehensive single point mutation libraries for AcrIIA4 and AcrIIA5, two potent inhibitors of CRISPR-Cas9. The resulting mutational fitness landscapes revealed considerable mutational tolerance for both Acrs, suggesting an intrinsic redundancy with respect to Cas9 inhibitory features, and – for AcrIIA5 – indicated mutations that boost Cas9 inhibition. Subsequent in vitro characterization suggested that the observed differences in inhibitory potency between mutant inhibitors were mostly due to changes in binding affinity rather than protein expression levels. Finally, to demonstrate that our pipeline can inform Acrs-based genome editing applications, we employed a selected subset of mutant inhibitors to increase CRISPR-Cas9 target specificity by modulating Cas9 activity. Taken together, our work establishes deep mutational scanning as a powerful method for anti-CRISPR protein characterization and optimization.
Project description:During infection, phages manipulate bacteria to redirect metabolism towards viral proliferation. To counteract phages, some bacteria employ CRISPR-Cas systems that provide adaptive immunity. While CRISPR-Cas mechanisms have been studied extensively, their effects on both the phage and the host during phage infection remains poorly understood. Here, we analysed the infection of Serratia by a siphovirus (JS26) and the transcriptomic response with, or without type I-E or I-F CRISPR-Cas immunity. In non-immune Serratia, phage infection altered bacterial metabolism by upregulating anaerobic respiration and amino acid biosynthesis genes, while flagella production was suppressed. Furthermore, phage proliferation required a late-expressed viral Cas4, which did not influence CRISPR adaptation. While type I-E and I-F immunity provided robust defence against phage infection, phage development still impacted the bacterial host. Moreover, DNA repair and SOS response pathways were upregulated during type I immunity. We also discovered that the type I-F system is controlled by a positive autoregulatory feedback loop that is activated upon phage targeting during type I-F immunity, leading to a controlled anti-phage response. Overall, our results provide new insight into phage-host dynamics and the impact of CRISPR immunity within the infected cell.
Project description:Following a CRISPR enhancer scan covering the GATA2 super-enhancer region, the top sgRNAs were selected for further inspection. MUTZ3 cells were thus treated with the selected sgRNAs and the region of interested was subjected to amplicons sequencing (amplicon-seq). To that end, we used the Illumina PCR-based custom amplicon sequencing method using the TruSeq Custom Amplicon index kit (Illumina). The same experiment was conducted in K562 cells, which do not harbor an inv(3)/t(3;3), to investigate the role of MYB in this enhancer in other leukemia settings
Project description:Purpose: The goals of this study are to introduce a new genome editing tool, which has the higher editing scope than the original genome editing tools. Methods: First, we transfected PE2 (the original prime editing tool, prime editor2), PE3 (the original prime editing tool, prime editor3) and HOPE (the new tool we developed in this study) vectors into human cells, respectively. Then, we harvested the genomic DNA form the transfected cells and amplified the specified amplicons. Finally, we used targeted amplicon sequencing approach to compare the editing efficiency and presion of the new tool with the original reported tools. Results: Our new genome editing tool improves the editing efficiency of prime editing without increasing the risk of undesired indels formation. Conclusions: We deleveped a new genome editing tool to increase the likelihood of successful gene engineering.
Project description:Bacteria protect themselves from infection by bacteriophages (phages) using different defence systems, such as CRISPR-Cas. Although CRISPR-Cas provides phage resistance, fitness costs are incurred, such as through autoimmunity. CRISPR-Cas regulation can optimise defence and minimise these costs. We recently developed a genome-wide functional genomics approach (SorTn-seq) for high-throughput discovery of regulators of bacterial gene expression. Here, we applied SorTn-seq to identify loci influencing expression of the two type III-A Serratia CRISPR arrays. Multiple genes affected CRISPR expression, including those involved in outer membrane and lipopolysaccharide synthesis. By comparing loci affecting type III CRISPR arrays and cas operon expression, we identified PigU (LrhA) as a repressor that co-ordinately controls both arrays and cas genes. By repressing type III-A CRISPR-Cas expression, PigU shuts off CRISPR-Cas interference against plasmids and phages. PigU also represses interference and CRISPR adaptation by the type I-F system, which is also present in Serratia. RNA sequencing demonstrated that PigU is a global regulator that controls secondary metabolite production and motility, in addition to CRISPR-Cas immunity. Increased PigU also resulted in elevated expression of three Serratia prophages, indicating their likely induction upon sensing PigU-induced cellular changes. In summary, PigU is a major regulator of CRISPR-Cas immunity in Serratia.
Project description:Multiple immune pathways in humans conjugate ubiquitin-like proteins to virus and host molecules as a means of antiviral defense. Here we studied an anti-phage defense system in bacteria, comprising a ubiquitin-like protein, ubiquitin-conjugating enzymes E1 and E2, and a deubiquitinase. We show that during phage infection, this system specifically conjugates the ubiquitin-like protein to the phage central tail fiber, a protein at the tip of the tail that is essential for tail assembly as well as for recognition of the target host receptor. Following infection, cells encoding this defense system release a mixture of partially assembled, tailless phage particles, and fully assembled phages in which the central tail fiber is obstructed by the covalently attached ubiquitin-like protein. These phages exhibit severely impaired infectivity, explaining how the defense system protects the bacterial population from the spread of phage infection. Our findings demonstrate that conjugation of ubiquitin-like proteins is an antiviral strategy conserved across the tree of life.
Project description:Highly specific amplification of complex DNA pools without bias or template-independent products (TIPs) remains a challenge. We have developed a procedure using phi29 DNA polymerase and trehalose and optimized control of amplification to create micrograms of specific amplicons without TIPs from down to sub-femtograms of DNA. The amplicons from 5 ng and 0.5 ng DNA, which were from originally good quality of gDNA (05-050), or partially degraded gDNA (04-018), faithfully demonstrated all previously known heterozygous segmental duplications and deletions (3 Mb to 18 kb) located on chromosome 22 and even a homozygous deletion smaller than 1 kb with high resolution chromosome-wide CGH. Specifically, HR-CGH with 5 ng-input gDNA-derived amplicon detected all previously known chromosomal segmental aberrations in chromosome 22 in samples from two different probands, and was indistinguishable from the HR-CGH result with native gDNA from the same probands (Fig. 4, Fig. S3 and S4). The break points were also precisely demonstrated. These include a heterozygous genomic segmental duplication (3 copies, 3 Mb in size, sample 05-050, Fig. 4) and 2 different heterozygous deletions (1 copy, 1.4 Mb and 18 kb respectively, sample 04-018, Fig. S4), all of which are located in or bounded by regions of low copy repeats (LCRs). In addition, a previous known homozygous deletion of 975 bp (in 04-018 and 05-050) was again accurately demonstrated (05-050 data showed in Fig. 4c), although sometimes (04-018) the data was a little noisier than with unamplified DNA (Fig. S4d). In contrast, the Wpa-40oC resulted in abundant signal noise and failed in detection of these copy number aberrations (Fig. 4, Fig. S3, S4). Impressively, HR-CGH with 0.5 ng gDNA-derived amplicons via Wpa also clearly detected the known CNVs, although noisier (Fig. S4). The 0.1ng gDNA derived amplicons via Wpa could not unambiguously show CNVs because of higher variability of signals, but the CNVs’ patterns were mostly well maintained (Fig. S4 for 04-018). We did also notice some locus-imbalance in the amplicon, however this was minimized, and was reproducible when the input was above a certain threshold amount, and it could be well compensated if the same amplified reference sample was applied in parallel as showed above. Keywords: Whole-pool amplification, high resolution comparative genome hybridization (HR-CGH)