A CRISPR-del-based pipeline for complete gene knockout in human diploid cells

The advance of CRISPR/Cas9 technology has enabled us easily to generate gene knockout cell lines by introducing insertion–deletion mutations (indels) at the target site via the error-prone non-homologous end joining repair system. Frameshift-promoting indels can disrupt gene functions by generation of a premature stop codon. However, there is growing evidence that targeted genes are not always knocked out by the indel-based gene disruption. Here, we established a pipeline of CRISPR-del, which induces a large chromosomal deletion by cutting two different target sites, to perform ‘complete’ gene knockout efficiently in human diploid cells. Quantitative analyses show that the frequency of gene deletion with this approach is much higher than that of conventional CRISPR-del methods. The lengths of the deleted genomic regions demonstrated in this study are longer than those of 95% of the human protein-coding genes. Furthermore, the pipeline enabled the generation of a model cell line having a bi-allelic cancer-associated chromosomal deletion. Overall, these data lead us to propose that the CRISPR-del pipeline is an efficient and practical approach for producing ‘complete’ gene knockout cell lines in human diploid cells.