P3a site-specific and cassette mutagenesis for seamless protein, RNA and plasmid engineering

Abstract

Site-directed mutagenesis is a basic molecular tool required for protein, RNA and plasmid engineering. For mutagenesis methods, an ideal goal is to reach the efficiency of 100%. Towards this goal, we have recently taken the first step by adopting an innovative strategy using primer pairs with 3′-overhangs, thereby developing P3 site-directed mutagenesis, with an average efficiency of ~50%. As the second step towards the ideal goal, we report here P3a site-directed mutagenesis with an efficiency reaching ~100%. We systematically evaluated this new method by engineering >100 point mutations and small deletions (or insertions) on >20 mammalian expression vectors encoding various epigenetic regulators and the spike protein of SARS-CoV-2. As all known mutagenesis methods are limited to point mutations and small deletions/insertions (up to a dozen nucleotides), a technical problem is how to carry out cassette mutagenesis for replacement, deletion or insertion of large DNA fragments. The high efficiency of P3a mutagenesis and the ‘handshaking’ feature of primer pairs with 3′-overhangs inspired us to adapt this new method for seamless cassette mutagenesis, including highly efficient epitope tagging and untagging, deletion of small or large DNA fragments (up to 5 kb) and insertion of gene fragments (up to ~0.4 kb), LoxP sites and sequences encoding degrons, sgRNA and tigRNA. Thus, this new site-specific and cassette mutagenesis method is highly efficient, fast and versatile, likely resulting in its wide use for typical biomedical research, as well as for engineering and refining synthetic or mutant proteins from AI-assisted design.