PnB Designer: a web application to design prime and base editor guide RNAs for animals and plants
In a recent "BMC Bioinformatics" paper the Corn group (IMHS) in collaboration with the Genome Engineering & Measurement Lab (GEML) developed PnB Designer, a web-based application for the design of guide RNAs for prime and base editing.
Recently developed CRISPR cytosine or adenine base editors (CBEs and ABEs) and CRISPR prime editors (PEs) hold great promise to model and correct disease-causing mutations in animal and plant models. But so far, no widely-available tools exist to automate the design of both BE and PE reagents.
The Corn lab developed PnB Designer, a web-based application for the design of pegRNAs for PEs and guide RNAs for BEs. PnB Designer makes it easy to design targeting guide RNAs for single or multiple targets on a variant or reference genome from organisms spanning multiple kingdoms. With PnB Designer, they were able to design pegRNAs to model all known disease causing mutations available in ClinVar. Additionally, PnB Designer can be used to design guide RNAs to install or revert a SNV, scanning the genome with one CBE and seven different ABE PAM variants and returning the best BE to use.
The PnB Designer is a user-friendly design tool for CRISPR PE and BE reagents, which should simplify choosing editing strategy and avoiding design complications.
Link to the paper in external pageBMC Bioinformatics.