Rapid generation of drug-resistance alleles at endogenous loci using CRISPR-Cas9 indel mutagenesis.

Autor: Jonathan J Ipsaro, Chen Shen, Eri Arai, Yali Xu, Justin B Kinney, Leemor Joshua-Tor, Christopher R Vakoc, Junwei Shi
Jazyk: angličtina
Rok vydání: 2017
Předmět:
Zdroj: PLoS ONE, Vol 12, Iss 2, p e0172177 (2017)
Druh dokumentu: article
ISSN: 1932-6203
DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0172177
Popis: Genetic alterations conferring resistance to the effects of chemical inhibitors are valuable tools for validating on-target effects in cells. Unfortunately, for many therapeutic targets such alleles are not available. To address this issue, we evaluated whether CRISPR-Cas9-mediated insertion/deletion (indel) mutagenesis can produce drug-resistance alleles at endogenous loci. This method takes advantage of the heterogeneous in-frame alleles produced following Cas9-mediated DNA cleavage, which we show can generate rare alleles that confer resistance to the growth-arrest caused by chemical inhibitors. We used this approach to identify novel resistance alleles of two lysine methyltransferases, DOT1L and EZH2, which are each essential for the growth of MLL-fusion leukemia cells. We biochemically characterized the DOT1L mutation, showing that it is significantly more active than the wild-type enzyme. These findings validate the on-target anti-leukemia activities of existing DOT1L and EZH2 inhibitors and reveal a simple method for deriving drug-resistance alleles for novel targets, which may have utility during early stages of drug development.
Databáze: Directory of Open Access Journals