Document Type

Article

Publication Date

2-12-2020

Keywords

JGM

JAX Source

mSphere 2020 Feb 12; 5(1):e00086-20

Volume

5

Issue

1

ISSN

2379-5042

PMID

32051236

DOI

https://doi.org/10.1128/mSphere.00086-20

Grant

GM126893,NS105539,AI142733,AR075174,AR073562,AI119231,DE027870,Department of Defense,National Science Foundation (1853071), the American Cancer Society, Leo Foundation

Abstract

The CRISPR/Cas system has significant potential to facilitate gene editing in a variety of bacterial species. CRISPR interference (CRISPRi) and CRISPR activation (CRISPRa) represent modifications of the CRISPR/Cas9 system utilizing a catalytically inactive Cas9 protein for transcription repression and activation, respectively. While CRISPRi and CRISPRa have tremendous potential to systematically investigate gene function in bacteria, few programs are specifically tailored to identify guides in draft bacterial genomes genomewide. Furthermore, few programs offer open-source code with flexible design parameters for bacterial targeting. To address these limitations, we created GuideFinder, a customizable, user-friendly program that can design guides for any annotated bacterial genome. GuideFinder designs guides from NGG protospacer-adjacent motif (PAM) sites for any number of genes by the use of an annotated genome and FASTA file input by the user. Guides are filtered according to user-defined design parameters and removed if they contain any off-target matches. Iteration with lowered parameter thresholds allows the program to design guides for genes that did not produce guides with the more stringent parameters, one of several features unique to GuideFinder. GuideFinder can also identify paired guides for targeting multiplicity, whose validity we tested experimentally. GuideFinder has been tested on a variety of diverse bacterial genomes, finding guides for 95% of genes on average. Moreover, guides designed by the program are functionally useful-focusing on CRISPRi as a potential application-as demonstrated by essential gene knockdown in two staphylococcal species. Through the large-scale generation of guides, this open-access software will improve accessibility to CRISPR/Cas studies of a variety of bacterial species.

Comments

This is an open-addess article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license.

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