An APOBEC3A-Cas9 base editor with minimized bystander and off-target activities

Base editor (BE) technology, which uses CRISPR-Cas9 to direct cytidine deaminase enzymatic activity to specific genomic loci, enables the highly efficient introduction of precise cytidine-to-thymidine DNA alterations(1–6). However, existing BEs create unwanted C to T alterations when more than one C is present in the enzyme’s five-base-pair editing window. Here we describe a strategy for reducing bystander mutations using an engineered human APOBEC3A (eA3A) domain, which preferentially deaminates cytidines in specific motifs according to a TCR>TCY>VCN hierarchy. In direct comparisons with the widely used BE3 fusion in human cells, our eA3A-BE3 fusion exhibits similar activities on cytidines in TC motifs but greatly reduced editing on cytidines in other sequence contexts. eA3A-BE3 corrects a human beta-thalassemia promoter mutation with much higher (>40-fold) precision than BE3. We also demonstrate that eA3A-BE3 shows reduced mutation frequencies on known off-target sites of BE3, even when targeting promiscuous homopolymeric sites.