Expression of RecA and cell-penetrating peptide (CPP) fusion protein in bacteria and in mammalian cells

Genome editing is a powerful tool to modify a specific gene and to correct a disease-causing mutation. Recently developed new techniques, such as zinc-finger nucleases (ZFNs), transcription activator-like effector nucleases (TALEN) and clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats/Cas9 (CRISPR/Cas9), significantly facilitate the progression in this field. However, mutations associated with the double strand DNA breaks (DSBs) introduced by these systems hampered their direct usage in clinic. In order to prevent the mutations caused by DSBs, we have designed a novel mean to induce homology-directed recombination (HDR) without DSBs, i.e., the fusion protein of RecA with cell-penetrating peptide (CPP). The involvement of RecA in these fusion proteins will play important roles in formation of the nucleoprotein filament with single strand DNA (ssDNA) in vitro and promoting HDR in vivo; whereas the involvement of CPP in these fusion proteins will mainly play a role in facilitating cellular intake/uptake of the nucleoprotein filaments. Our results indicated that certain amount of the fusion proteins expressed in bacteria is in soluble fraction, whereas majority of the fusion proteins expressed in baby hamster kidney (BHK) cells is in soluble fraction. Interestingly, expression of these fusion proteins in bacteria completely blocked cell growth, whereas expression of them in BHK cells significantly inhibited cell growth, implying that these fusion proteins may bind to ssDNA regions, such as ssDNA regions in DNA replication forks, and inhibit cell growth. These results suggest that we have functional RecA.CPP fusion proteins ready to test our novel idea of inducing HDR without DSB.