bioRxiv preprint doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/2020.04.25.060541; this version posted April 28, 2020. The copyright holder for this preprint (which was not certified by peer review) is the author/funder, who has granted bioRxiv a license to display the preprint in perpetuity. It is made available under aCC-BY-NC-ND 4.0 International license. MMEJ-based Precision Gene Editing for applications in Gene Therapy and Functional Genomics Gabriel Martínez-Gálvez1, Armando Manduca1, and Stephen C. Ekker2,* 1 Department of Biomedical Engineering & Physiology, Mayo Clinic, Rochester, MN, 55905, USA 2 Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology, Mayo Clinic, Rochester, MN, 55905, USA * To whom correspondence should be addressed. Tel: +1 507-284-5530; Fax: +1 507-293-1058; Email:
[email protected] Biorxiv v1.01 ABSTRACT Experiments in gene editing commonly elicit error-prone non-homologous end joining for DNA double-strand break (DSB) repair. Microhomology-mediated end joining (MMEJ) can generate more predictable outcomes for functional genomic and somatic therapeutic applications. MENTHU is a computational tool that predicts nuclease-targetable sites likely to result in MMEJ-repaired, homogeneous genotypes (PreMAs) in zebrafish. We deployed MENTHU on 5,885 distinct Cas9-mediated DSBs in mouse embryonic stem cells, and compared the predictions to those by inDelphi, another DSB repair predictive algorithm. MENTHU correctly identified 46% of all PreMAs available, doubling the sensitivity of inDelphi. We also introduce MENTHU@4, an MENTHU update trained on this large dataset. We trained two MENTHU-based algorithms on this larger dataset and validated them against each other, MENTHU, and inDelphi.