Abstract
Gene tagging with fluorescent proteins (FPs) is essential to investigate the dynamic properties of cellular proteins. Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats/Cas9 technology (CRISPR/Cas9) technology is a powerful tool for inserting fluorescent markers into all alleles of the gene of interest and permits functionality and physiological expression of the fusion protein. It is essential to evaluate such genome-edited cell lines carefully in order to preclude off-target effects caused by either (i) incorrect insertion of the FP, (ii) perturbation of the fusion protein by the FP or (iii) non-specific genomic DNA damage by CRISPR/Cas9. In this protocol, we provide a step-by-step description of our systematic pipeline to generate and validate homozygous fluorescent knock-in cell lines. We have used the paired Cas9D10A nickase approach to efficiently insert tags into specific genomic loci via homology-directed repair (HDR) with minimal off-target effects. It is not only time- and cost-effective to perform whole genome sequencing of each cell clone, but also there are spontaneous genetic variations occurring in mammalian cell lines. Therefore we have developed an efficient validation pipeline of the generated cell lines consisting of junction PCR, Southern Blot analysis, Sanger sequencing, microscopy, Western blot analysis and live cell imaging for cell cycle dynamics which takes between 6-9 weeks. Using this pipeline, 70% of the targeted genes could be tagged homozygously with FPs and resulted in physiological levels and phenotypically functional expression of the fusion proteins. In contrast to a study that systematically tagged genes using CRISPR/Cas9 in human stem cells1, our approach resulted in homozygously tagged proteins of interests.
