CT5, a subtle in vitro DNA assembling method based on the combination of FnCas12a and T5 exonuclease

Abstract

Objective To develop a new DNA assembly method based on FnCas12a and T5 exonuclease. Results We developed a method named as FnCas12a and T5 exonuclease (CT5) cloning system. FnCas12a performs site-directed cleavage to the target DNA fragments, and T5 exonuclease generates 20–30 nt single-stranded region at each end of the DNA fragments for homologous recombination-mediated DNA assembly. CT5 was applied to multi-fragment assembly and DNA cloning of large vectors (> 10 kb). The efficiencies were approximately 91.4% and 97%, respectively. In addition, CT5 cloning is also utilized for the "walking" of DNA elements, which enables subtle modification of the relative distances of DNA elements in plasmids. Conclusions The CT5 method was a precise and exquisite DNA operating system and provided an ideal platform for the study of gene functions, genetic engineering and synthetic biology.