Project description:Fusion of active protein domains to the nuclease-deficient clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeat (CRISPR) associated protein 9 (dCas9) has been widely used for epigenome editing, but the specificities of these engineered proteins have still not been fully investigated. Targeted methylation of specific gene loci offers a direct approach to perturb DNA methylation-associated biological processes. In this study, we generated and validated the global off-target characteristics of CRISPR-guided DNA methyltransferases (CRISPRme) by fusing the catalytic domain of DNMT3A or DNMT3B to the C terminus of the dCas9 protein from S. pyogenes. Using targeted quantitative bisulfite pyrosequencing and whole genome bisulfite sequencing (WGBS), we prove that CRISPRme can efficiently methylate the CpG dinucleotides flanking its target sites in genomic loci (uPA and TGFBR3) in human cells (HEK293T) with CpG-methylation levels exceeding 70% for some target sites. Using qPCR, fluorescent reporter cells, and RNA sequencing, we found that CRISPRme can mediate transient inhibition of gene expression which appears to result from Cas9-mediated interference with transcription rather than de novo DNA methylation. Analyses of whole genome methylation did not identify global methylation changes, however a substantial number of CRISPRme off-target differentially methylated regions (DMR, over 6000) were still identified. The majority of these DMRs were hypermethylated both in cells expressing CRISPRme alone and cells expressing CRISPRme together with gRNAs. These off-target hypermethylated sites were enriched in gene bodies, introns, 5’UTR, CGI shores, Alu sequences, open chromatin and PAM rich regions, but not correlated with off-target binding sites predicted by ChIP-seq. Our results prove that CRISPRme allows for efficient RNA-guided methylation of endogenous CpGs, however with high frequencies of off-target methylation indicating that further improvements of the specificity of CRISPR-dCas9 based DNA methylation modifiers are still required.

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Inhibition of uPA expression by CRISPR-dCas9 DNA methyltransferases

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