Kabin Xie, professor of the Rice Team in our school, has published a research paper entitled Engineering introns to express RNA guides for Cas9- and Cpf1- mediated multiplex genome editing in Molecular Plant. It explains a new method to express gRNA by introns, which can be widely used in Genome Editing mediated by Cas9 and Cpf1.
The Genome Editing technique based on the CRISPR-Cas9 is not only regarded as the revolutionary technique of the life science in these years but also one of the most intense fields in science research. As to the gRNA and Cas9, which is used to express the CRISPR-Cas9 technique more efficiently in organisms, Kabin Xie’s research group has borrowed the intron shearing system and tRNA processing system cleverly to transform the introns into the expression platform of the gRNA. Going step further by mixing intron and Cas9 together into one gene, they achieved the coordinated expression of Cas9 and gRNA.
Experimental results in rice show that this technology has better extensibility and flexibility in improving genome editing efficiency and multi-point editing ability. In addition, they also applied this method to CRISPR-Cpf1 system and made use of the typical crRNA processing activity of Cpf1 to simplify the technique of expressing gRNA. Experimental results in rice protoplast show that using intron to express the gRNA can also improve genome editing efficiency. This research used the existing RNA system of processing in vivo and changes the intron into treasure which can be used as a tool for the construction of genome editing. For the intron is one of the basic components of the eukaryotic gene, the method is expected to be widely used in animals and plants to promote the development and application of CRISPR technology.
This paper is mainly completed by Dan Ding, a master student of 2015 and Kaiyuan Chen , a doctoral degree student of 2016. It has been awarded the National GM major program, the National Natural Science Foundation and the Independent Scientific and Technological Innovation Fund in school.
