Engineered AcrIIA5 for optogenetic control of CRISPR-Cas9-based genome editing

The CRISPR-Cas9 system has been proven to be a powerful tool for gene editing in living cells and shows great potential in genetic disease treatment. Anti-CRISPR (Acr)-based optogenetic tools could spatiotemporally regulate the activity of CRISPR-Cas9, thereby improving the precision and safety of gene editing. However, these tools could only regulate a certain Cas9 protein because of the high specificity of Acr used, limiting their further application. In this study, we developed a new optogenetic tool named CASANOVA-A5 (CRISPR-Cas9 activity switching via a novel optogenetic variant of AcrIIA5) by inserting the blue light sensor AsLOV2 into AcrIIA5 with a broad inhibition spectrum. We proved that the CASANOVA-A5 could regulate the gene editing activity of SpCas9, SaCas9, NmeCas9, and St1Cas9 in a blue light-dependent manner. Additionally, we engineered AcrIIA5-LOV9 by integrating the blue light-dependent degron module LOV9, showing obvious optical regulation for SpCas9. Together, our work demonstrates two feasible methods to engineer the Acrs to potent optogenetic tools and suggests systematic strategies for further optimization.