Epitope recognition of magnetic peptide-imprinted chitosan composite nanoparticles for the extraction of CRISPR/dCas9a proteins from transfected cells

The clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats (CRISPR)/CRISPR-associated protein (Cas9) technology is a powerful method for genetic modification (and regulation) that is of great current interest. The development of new, economical methods of detecting and extracting Cas9 (and/or dCas9) from transfected cells is thus an important advance. In this work, we employed molecular imprinting, using two peptides from the Cas9 protein, to make magnetic peptide-imprinted chitosan nanoparticles. dCas9 was encoded in a plasmid which was then transfected into human embryonic kidney (HEK293T) cells. The expression of dCas9 protein was measured by using total protein kits. Finally, the imprinted nanoparticles were used to extract dCas9 from transfected cell homogenates.