Engineering CjCas9 for Efficient Base Editing and Prime Editing

The CRISPR-Cas9 system has been applied for clinical applications of gene therapy. Most CRISPR-based gene therapies are derived from Streptococcus pyogenes Cas9, which is challenging to package into a single adeno-associated virus vector and limits its clinical applications. Campylobacter jejuni Cas9 (CjCas9) is one of the smallest Cas9 proteins. CjCas9-mediated base editing (CjBE) efficiency varies across genomic sites, while CjCas9-mediated prime editing (CjPE) efficiency is less than 5% on average. Here we developed enhanced cytosine base editors (enCjCBEs) and adenine base editors (enCjABEs) by engineered CjCas9^P47K. We demonstrated the robust C-to-T conversion (70% on average) by enCjCBE or A-to-G conversion (76% on average) by enCjABE. Meanwhile, we applied the CjCas9^P47K variant to generate enhanced CjPE (enCjPE), which increases the editing efficiency 17-fold at the PRNP site over wild-type CjPE. Fusing nonspecific DNA binding protein Sso7d to enCjCas9 and MS2 stem-loop RNA aptamer to the 3-terminal of cognate pegRNA resulted in 12% editing efficiency on average with a 24-fold increase over wild-type CjPE, and we termed it SsenCjPE. The SsenCjPE can also be combined with hMLH1dn to further increase the editing efficiency and MMLV RTaseΔRnH to reduce size. Finally, we introduced an additional mutation D829R into SsenCjPE and generated SsenCjPE-M2 with a 61-fold increase of PE efficiency over wild-type at the PRNP site. In summary, enCjBEs, SsenCjPEs, or SsenCjPE-M2 are compact Cas9-derived BE or prime editors in biological research or biomedical applications.