Abstract
BackgroundDNA transposons have emerged as indispensible tools for manipulating vertebrate genomes with applications ranging from insertional mutagenesis and transgenesis to gene therapy. To fully explore the potential of two highly active DNA transposons, piggyBac and Tol2, as mammalian genetic tools, we have conducted a side-by-side comparison of the two transposon systems in the same setting to evaluate their advantages and disadvantages for use in gene therapy and gene discovery.ResultsWe have observed that (1) the Tol2 transposase (but not piggyBac) is highly sensitive to molecular engineering; (2) the piggyBac donor with only the 40 bp 3'-and 67 bp 5'-terminal repeat domain is sufficient for effective transposition; and (3) a small amount of piggyBac transposases results in robust transposition suggesting the piggyBac transpospase is highly active. Performing genome-wide target profiling on data sets obtained by retrieving chromosomal targeting sequences from individual clones, we have identified several piggyBac and Tol2 hotspots and observed that (4) piggyBac and Tol2 display a clear difference in targeting preferences in the human genome. Finally, we have observed that (5) only sites with a particular sequence context can be targeted by either piggyBac or Tol2.ConclusionsThe non-overlapping targeting preference of piggyBac and Tol2 makes them complementary research tools for manipulating mammalian genomes. PiggyBac is the most promising transposon-based vector system for achieving site-specific targeting of therapeutic genes due to the flexibility of its transposase for being molecularly engineered. Insights from this study will provide a basis for engineering piggyBac transposases to achieve site-specific therapeutic gene targeting.
Highlights
DNA transposons have emerged as indispensible tools for manipulating vertebrate genomes with applications ranging from insertional mutagenesis and transgenesis to gene therapy
We have demonstrated that piggyBac and Tol2 display high transposition activity in several cell lines [15]
Using a polymerase chain reaction (PCR)-based strategy we generated pPB-cassette3short with the shortest Terminal repeat domain (TRD) reported replacing the long ones of the pXLBacII-cassette (Figure 1A) [29,30]
Summary
DNA transposons have emerged as indispensible tools for manipulating vertebrate genomes with applications ranging from insertional mutagenesis and transgenesis to gene therapy. To fully explore the potential of two highly active DNA transposons, piggyBac and Tol, as mammalian genetic tools, we have conducted a sideby-side comparison of the two transposon systems in the same setting to evaluate their advantages and disadvantages for use in gene therapy and gene discovery. Recent studies found that Tol is an effective tool both for transgenesis via pronuclear microinjection and germline insertional mutagenesis in mice [12]. PiggyBac was shown to be highly active in mouse and human cells and has emerged as a promising vector system for chromosomal integration, including insertional mutagenesis in mice and nuclear reprogramming of mouse fibroblasts to induced-pluripotent stem cells [14,15,16,17,18,19]
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