Akademska digitalna zbirka SLovenije - logo
E-resources
Full text
Peer reviewed Open access
  • Cell-Type-Specific CRISPR/C...
    Alyami, Mram Z; Alsaiari, Shahad K; Li, Yanyan; Qutub, Somayah S; Aleisa, Fajr A; Sougrat, Rachid; Merzaban, Jasmeen S; Khashab, Niveen M

    Journal of the American Chemical Society, 01/2020, Volume: 142, Issue: 4
    Journal Article

    Effective and cell-type-specific delivery of CRISPR/Cas9 gene editing elements remains a challenging open problem. Here we report the development of biomimetic cancer cell coated zeolitic imidazolate frameworks (ZIFs) for targeted and cell-specific delivery of this genome editing machinery. Coating ZIF-8 that is encapsulating CRISPR/Cas9 (CC-ZIF) with a cancer cell membrane resulted in the uniformly covered C3-ZIF(cell membrane type). Incubation of C3-ZIFMCF with MCF-7, HeLa, HDFn, and aTC cell lines showed the highest uptake by MCF-7 cells and negligible uptake by the healthy cells (i.e., HDFn and aTC). As to genome editing, a 3-fold repression in the EGFP expression was observed when MCF-7 were transfected with C3-ZIFMCF compared to 1-fold repression in the EGFP expression when MCF-7 were transfected with C3-ZIFHELA. In vivo testing confirmed the selectivity of C3-ZIFMCF to accumulate in MCF-7 tumor cells. This supports the ability of this biomimetic approach to match the needs of cell-specific targeting, which is unquestionably the most critical step in the future translation of genome editing technologies.