Dmitry Kostyushev, Sergey Brezgin, Anastasiya Kostyusheva, Natalia Ponomareva, Ekaterina Bayurova, Natalia Zakirova, Alla Kondrashova, Irina Goptar, Anastasiya Nikiforova, Anna Sudina, Yurii Babin, Ilya Gordeychuk, Alexander Lukashev, Andrey A Zamyatnin, Alexander Ivanov, Vladimir Chulanov
APOBEC/AID cytidine deaminases play an important role in innate immunity and antiviral defenses and were shown to suppress hepatitis B virus (HBV) replication by deaminating and destroying the major form of HBV genome, covalently closed circular DNA (cccDNA), without toxicity to the infected cells. However, developing anti-HBV therapeutics based on APOBEC/AID is complicated by the lack of tools for activating and controlling their expression. Here, we developed a CRISPR-activation-based approach (CRISPRa) to induce APOBEC/AID transient overexpression (>4-800,000-fold increase in mRNA levels)...
June 13, 2023: Molecular Therapy. Nucleic Acids