CRISPR/Cas12a-based genome editing for cyanophage of Anabeana sp.

Efforts have been conducted on cyanobacterial genome editing, yet achieving genome editing in cyanophages remains challenging. Editing cyanophage genomes is crucial for understanding and manipulating their interactions with cyanobacterial hosts, offering potential solutions for controlling cyanobacterial blooms. In this study, we developed a streamlined CRISPR-Cas12a-based method for efficient cyanophage genome editing and then applied this method to the cyanophages A-1(L) and A-4(L) of <i>Anabeana</i> sp. PCC.7120. Multiple hypothetical genes were edited and knocked out from these two cyanophage genomes, generating viable mutants with varying capabilities to inhibit cyanobacterial growth. All these mutants displayed significant inhibitory effects on the host, indicating that these genes were non-essential for phage life cycle and the deletion led to little impairment of the cyanophages in infectious efficiency to their host. By iterative and simultaneous gene knockouts in cyanophage A-4(L), we achieved the minimal genome mutant with a 2400 bp reduction in genome size, representing a 5.75 % decrease compared to the wild type (WT). In conclusion, these cyanophage mutants can facilitate the identification of nonessential genes for cyanophages biology and the insertion of foreign genes for synthetic biology research. This advancement holds promise in addressing the widespread issue of water blooms and the associated environmental hazards.