Illuminating single genomic loci in live cells by reducing nuclear background fluorescence

Abstract

The tagging of genomic loci in living cells provides visual evidence for the study of genomic spatial organization and gene interaction. CRISPR/dCas9 (clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats/deactivated Cas9) labeling system labels genes through binding of the dCas9/sgRNA/fluorescent protein complex to repeat sequences in the target genomic loci. However, the existence of numerous fluorescent proteins in the nucleus usually causes a high background fluorescent readout. This study aims to limit the number of fluorescent modules entering the nucleus by redesigning the current CRISPR/dCas9-SunTag labeling system consisting of dCas9-SunTag-NLS (target module) and scFv-sfGFP-NLS (signal module). We removed the nuclear location sequence (NLS) of the signal module and inserted two copies of EGFP into the signal module. The ratio of the fluorescent intensity of the nucleus to that of the cytoplasm (N/C ratio) was decreased by 71%, and the ratio of the signal to the background (S/B ratio) was increased by 1.6 times. The system can stably label randomly selected genomic loci with as few as 9 repeat sequences.