Ares-GT: Design of guide RNAs targeting multiple genes for CRISPR-Cas experiments

Abstract

Guide RNA design for CRISPR genome editing of gene families is a challenging task as usually good candidate sgRNAs are tagged with low scores precisely because they match several locations in the genome, thus time-consuming manual evaluation of targets is required. To address this issues, I have developed ARES-GT, a Python local command line tool compatible with any operative system. ARES-GT allows the selection of candidate sgRNAs that match multiple input query sequences, in addition of candidate sgRNAs that specifically match each query sequence. It also contemplates the use of unmapped contigs apart from complete genomes thus allowing the use of any genome provided by user and being able to handle intraspecies allelic variability and individual polymorphisms. ARES-GT is available at GitHub (https://github.com/eugomin/ARES-GT.git).

Fig 1. sgRNS targets in CBF genes.

A) Genomic distribution of CBF genes in Arabiopsis thaliana chromosomes 4 and 5. Location of Cas9 (B) and Cas12a (C) candidates with multiple CBF gene targets. (*) Asterisk marks candidates corresponding with previously reported sgRNAs (Cho et al., 2017).