CRISPR technologies comprising a Cas nuclease and a guide RNA (gRNA) can utilize multiple gRNAs to enact multi-site editing or regulation in the same cell. Nature devised a highly compact means of encoding gRNAs in the form of CRISPR arrays composed of conserved repeats separated by targeting spacers. However, the capacity to acquire new spacers keeps the arrays longer than necessary for CRISPR technologies. Here, we show that CRISPR arrays utilized by the Cas9 nuclease can be shortened without compromising and sometimes even enhancing targeting activity. Using multiplexed gene repression in E. coli, we found that each region could be systematically shortened to varying degrees before severely compromising targeting activity. Surprisingly, shortening some spacers yielded enhanced targeting activity, which was linked to folding of the transcribed array prior to processing. Overall, shortened CRISPR-Cas9 arrays can facilitate multiplexed editing and gene regulation from a smaller DNA footprint across many bacterial applications of CRISPR technologies.
Keywords: CRISPR arrays; CRISPR-Cas9; RNA structure prediction; multiplexed targeting; transcriptional repression.