Correspondence of Yolk Sac and Embryonic Genotypes in F0 Mouse CRISPants.

Abstract

CRISPR-mediated genome editing in vivo can be accompanied by prolonged stability of the Cas9 protein in mouse embryos. Then, genome edited variant alleles will be induced as long as Cas9 protein is active, and unmodified wildtype target loci are available. The corollary is that CRISPR-modified alleles that arise after the first zygotic cell division potentially could be distributed asymmetrically to the cell lineages that are specified early during morula and blastocyst development. This has practical implications for the investigation of F0 generation individuals, as cells in embryonic and extraembryonic tissues, such as the visceral yolk sac, might end up inheriting different genotypes. We here investigated the hypothetically possible scenarios by genotyping individual F0 CRISPants and their associated visceral yolk sacs in parallel. In all cases, we found that embryonic genotype was accurately reflected by yolk sac genotyping, with the two tissues indicating genetic congruence, even when the conceptus was a mosaic of cells with distinct allele configurations. Nevertheless, low abundance of a variant allele may represent a private mutation occurring only in the yolk sac, and in those rare cases, additional genotyping to determine the mutational status of the embryo proper is warranted.