Hypercompact CRISPR–Cas12j2 (CasΦ) enables genome editing, gene activation, and epigenome editing in plants
Shishi Liu, Simon Sretenovic, Tingting Fan, Yanhao Cheng, Gen Li, Aileen Qi, Xu Tang, Yang Xu, Weijun Guo, Zhaohui Zhong, Yao He, Yanling Liang, Qinqin Han, Xuelian Zheng, Xiaofeng Gu, Yiping Qi, Yong Zhang
Abstract
CRISPR-Cas9, -Cas12a, -Cas12b, and -Cas13 have been harnessed for genome engineering in human and plant cells (Liu et al., 2022). However, the large size of these Cas proteins (e.g. ∼190 kDa for SpCas9) makes them difficult to deliver into cells via a viral vector. The development of smaller Cas proteins will lead to reduced viral vector sizes that can be more widely adopted in versatile genome engineering systems. Recently, a CRISPR-Cas12j2 (CasΦ) system was discovered in huge phages and developed into a hypercompact genome editor due to the small size of Cas12j2 (∼80 kDa) (Pausch et al., 2020).