Abstract
Synthetic transcriptional networks built from CRISPR-based repressors (CRISPRi) rely on shared use of a core dCas9 protein. In E. coli, CRISPRi cannot support more than about a dozen simultaneous gRNAs before the fold repression of any individual gRNA drops below 10x. We show with a simple model based on previous characterization of competition in CRISPRi that activation by CRISPR-based activators (CRISPRa) is much less sensitive to dCas9 bottle-necking than CRISPRi. We predict that E. coli should be able to support dozens to hundreds of CRISPRa gRNAs at >10-fold activation.
Footnotes
Correction to Figure 1.
Copyright
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