Gehrke, J. M. et al. Nat. Biotechnol. https://doi.org/10.1038/nbt.4199 (2018).
Wang, X. et al. Nat. Biotechnol. https://doi.org/10.1038/nbt.4198 (2018).
With their ability to introduce single-base changes without cutting both strands of the DNA base, editors are the rising stars in the CRISPR portfolio. The past two years have seen advances in on-target activity, but targeting editors to a specific base while leaving those in the vicinity unchanged is still a challenge. For a C-to-T edit, a Cas9 nickase is fused to a cytidine deaminase, most commonly rat APOBEC1, and a uracil DNA glycosylase inhibitor that prevents repair of the edited base. To narrow the specificity of the base editor to a single C within the editing window, Gehrke et al. used human APOBEC3A, which requires a TCA/G motif for editing and hardly edits Cs in other sequence contexts. Independently, Wang et al. also found that human APOBEC3A has a narrower editing window and efficiently converts Cs to Ts in regions with high DNA methylation levels.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Rusk, N. Better base editors. Nat Methods 15, 763 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41592-018-0154-4
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41592-018-0154-4