A novel CRISPR/Cas9 associated technology for sequence-specific nucleic acid enrichment

Massively parallel sequencing technologies have made it possible to generate large quantities of sequence data. However, as research-associated information is transferred into clinical practice, cost and throughput constraints generally require sequence-specific targeted analyses. Therefore, sample enrichment methods have been developed to meet the needs of clinical sequencing applications. However, current amplification and hybrid capture enrichment methods are limited in the contiguous length of sequences for which they are able to enrich. PCR based amplification also loses methylation data and other native DNA features. We have developed a novel technology (Negative Enrichment) where we demonstrate targeting long (>10 kb) genomic regions of interest. We use the specificity of CRISPR-Cas9 single guide RNA (Cas9/sgRNA) complexes to define 5' and 3' termini of sequence-specific loci in genomic DNA, targeting 10 to 36 kb regions. The complexes were found to provide protection from exonucleases, by protecting the targeted sequences from degradation, resulting in enriched, double-strand, non-amplified target sequences suitable for next-generation sequencing library preparation or other downstream analyses.