Increased Enrichment and Generation of Isogenic Lines Using a Transient Reporter for Editing Enrichment

Alzheimer’s disease (AD) affects over 5 million individuals each year in the United States. Furthermore, most cases of AD are sporadic, making it extremely difficult to model and study in vitro. CRISPR/Cas9 and base editing technologies have been of recent interest because of their ability to create single nucleotide edits at nearly any genomic sequence using a Cas9 protein and a guide RNA (sgRNA). Currently, there is no available phenotype to differentiate edited cells from unedited cells. Past research has employed fluorescent proteins bound to Cas9 proteins to attempt to enrich for edited cells, however, these methods are only reporters of transfection (RoT) and are no indicative of actual base-editing occurring. Thus, this study proposes a transient reporter for editing enrichment (TREE) and Cas9-mediated adenosine TREE (CasMasTREE) which use plasmids to co-transfect with CRISPR/Cas9 technologies to serve as an indicator of base-editing. Specifically, TREE features a blue fluorescent protein (BFP) mutant that, upon a C-T conversion, changes the emission spectrum to a green fluorescent protein (GFP). CasMasTREE features a mCherry and GFP protein separated by a stop codon which can be negated using an A-G conversion. By employing a sgRNA that targets one of the TREE plasmids and at least one genomic site, cells can be sorted for GFP(+) cells. Using these methods, base-edited isogenic hiPSC line generation using TREE (BIG-TREE) was created to generate isogenic hiPSC lines with AD-relevant edits. For example, BIG-TREE demonstrates the capability of converting Apolipoprotein E (APOE), a gene associated with AD-risk development, wildtype (3/3) into another isoform, APOE2/2, to create isogenic hiPSC lines. The capabilities of TREE are vast and can be applied to generate various models of diseases with specific genomic edits.