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Updated: Feb 12, 2026

A Fluorescence-based Method to Study Bacterial Gene Regulation in Infected Tissues
Published on: February 19, 2019
Unexpected binding behaviors of bacterial Argonautes in human cells cast doubts on their use as targetable gene
Henriette O'Geen1, Chonghua Ren1, Nicole B Coggins1
1Genome Center, University of California, Davis, California, United States of America.
Abstract:
Prokaryotic Argonaute proteins (pAgos) have been proposed as an alternative to the CRISPR/Cas9 platform for gene editing. Although Argonaute from Natronobacterium gregoryi (NgAgo) was recently shown unable to cleave genomic DNA in mammalian cells, the utility of NgAgo or other pAgos as a targetable DNA-binding platform for epigenetic editing has not been explored. In this report, we evaluated the utility of two prokaryotic Argonautes (NgAgo and TtAgo) as DNA-guided DNA-binding proteins. NgAgo showed no meaningful binding to chromosomal targets, while TtAgo displayed seemingly non-specific binding to chromosomal DNA even in the absence of guide DNA. The observed lack of DNA-guided targeting and unexpected guide-independent genome sampling under the conditions in this study provide evidence that these pAgos might be suitable for neither gene nor epigenome editing in mammalian cells.
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