GenomeWeb covers off-target effects in CRISPR Cytosine Base Editors
/CRISPR Researchers Find Cytosine Base Editors Generate Substantial Off-Target Effects
NEW YORK (GenomeWeb) – In a study published in Science late last week, researchers from the US, China, and Germany reported a new method they've developed to detect off-target mutations created from editing one blastomere of two-cell mouse embryos using either CRISPR-Cas9 or one of two base editing technologies.
This method — named GOTI (Genome-wide Off-target analysis by Two-cell embryo Injection) — found that off-target single nucleotide variants (SNVs) were rare in embryos edited by CRISPR-Cas9 or the adenine base editor 7.10 (ABE7.10), which both caused off-target effects with a frequency close to the spontaneous mutation rate. However, the researchers also found that the cytosine base editor 3 (BE3) induced SNVs with frequencies more than 20-fold higher than the spontaneous mutation rate.
