Development of CRISPR as an Antiviral Strategy to Combat SARS-CoV-2 and Influenza.

The coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic, caused by the SARS-CoV-2 virus, has highlighted the need for antiviral approaches that can target emerging viruses with no effective vaccines or pharmaceuticals. Here, we demonstrate a CRISPR-Cas13-based strategy, PAC-MAN (prophylactic antiviral CRISPR in human cells), for viral inhibition that can effectively degrade RNA from SARS-CoV-2 sequences and live influenza A virus (IAV) in human lung epithelial cells. We designed and screened CRISPR RNAs (crRNAs) targeting conserved viral regions and identified functional crRNAs targeting SARS-CoV-2. This approach effectively reduced H1N1 IAV load in respiratory epithelial cells. Our bioinformatic analysis showed that a group of only six crRNAs can target more than 90% of all coronaviruses. With the development of a safe and effective system for respiratory tract delivery, PAC-MAN has the potential to become an important pan-coronavirus inhibition strategy.

RNA language models predict mutations that improve RNA function.

Structured RNA lies at the heart of many central biological processes, from gene expression to catalysis. While advances in deep learning enable the prediction of accurate protein structural models, RNA structure prediction is not possible at present due to a lack of abundant high-quality reference data1. Furthermore, available sequence data are generally not associated with organismal phenotypes that could inform RNA function2-4. We created GARNET (Gtdb Acquired RNa with Environmental Temperatures), a new database for RNA structural and functional analysis anchored to the Genome Taxonomy Database (GTDB)5. GARNET links RNA sequences derived from GTDB genomes to experimental and predicted optimal growth temperatures of GTDB reference organisms. This enables construction of deep and diverse RNA sequence alignments to be used for machine learning. Using GARNET, we define the minimal requirements for a sequence- and structure-aware RNA generative model. We also develop a GPT-like language model for RNA in which overlapping triplet tokenization provides optimal encoding. Leveraging hyperthermophilic RNAs in GARNET and these RNA generative models, we identified mutations in ribosomal RNA that confer increased thermostability to the Escherichia coli ribosome. The GTDB-derived data and deep learning models presented here provide a foundation for understanding the connections between RNA sequence, structure, and function.

A comprehensive analysis and resource to use CRISPR-Cas13 for broad-spectrum targeting of RNA viruses.

The coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic caused by severe acute respiratory syndrome-coronavirus-2 (SARS-CoV-2) and variants has led to significant mortality. We recently reported that an RNA-targeting CRISPR-Cas13 system, called prophylactic antiviral CRISPR in human cells (PAC-MAN), offered an antiviral strategy against SARS-CoV-2 and influenza A virus. Here, we expand in silico analysis to use PAC-MAN to target a broad spectrum of human- or livestock-infectious RNA viruses with high specificity, coverage, and predicted efficiency. Our analysis reveals that a minimal set of 14 CRISPR RNAs (crRNAs) is able to target >90% of human-infectious viruses across 10 RNA virus families. We predict that a set of 5 experimentally validated crRNAs can target new SARS-CoV-2 variant sequences with zero mismatches. We also build an online resource (crispr-pacman.stanford.edu) to support community use of CRISPR-Cas13 for broad-spectrum RNA virus targeting. Our work provides a new bioinformatic resource for using CRISPR-Cas13 to target diverse RNA viruses to facilitate the development of CRISPR-based antivirals.