Place: 4274 Chamberlin (Refreshments will be served)
Speaker: Kris Saha, UW Department of Biomedical Engineering
Abstract: Writing specific DNA sequences into the human genome is challenging with gene-editing reagents, since most of the edited sequences contain various imprecise insertions or deletions of DNA sequence. Only a minor of sequences produced contain the desired sequence. We developed a modular RNA aptamer-streptavidin strategy, termed S1mplex, to complex CRISPR-Cas9 ribonucleoproteins with a nucleic acid donor template. In human cells, tailored S1mplexes increase the ratio of precisely edited to imprecisely edited alleles up to 18-fold higher than standard gene-editing methods, and enrich cell populations containing multiplexed precise edits up to 42-fold. Topics related to the complexity seen in the sequence outcomes will be discussed. Advances in reducing the complexity of sequence outcomes could greatly reduce the time and cost of in vitro or ex vivo gene-editing applications in precision medicine and drug discovery and aid in the development of increased and serial dosing regimens for somatic gene editing in vivo.