Gene editing treatment strategies for retinitis pigmentosa assessed in Xenopus laevis carrying a mutant Rhodopsin allele
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Aim: To examine the utility of gene editing therapies for retinitis pigmentosa using Xenopus laevis carrying a mutation in Rhodopsin. Methods: Xenopus laevis were genetically modified using CRISPR-Cas9 based methods and characterized by Sanger sequencing, dot blot, electroretinography, and confocal microscopy. Results: We identified genetically modified Xenopus laevis carrying a net 12 base pair deletion in the Rho.L gene. These animals have a retinal degeneration that is apparent by 14 days, with abnormal or missing rod outer segments, and a reduced electroretinogram signal. We prevented the majority of this retinal degeneration via a treatment strategy using a single sgRNA to neutralize the mutant allele via non-homologous end joining, yielding long-term improvements in histology and the electroretinogram. A second strategy using two sgRNAs to generate large deletions in the mutant allele was also successful, but did not significantly improve outcomes relative to the single-guide strategy as it was less efficient. We found limited evidence of success with a third strategy dependent on homology-directed repair; this treatment was also too inefficient to generate an outcome superior to the single-guide strategy. Conclusion: Our results demonstrate the utility of this new Xenopus laevis model for rapidly assessing and comparing multiple gene-editing based treatment strategies. We conclude that it would be technically difficult to improve on the simple single-guide based strategy, as strategies requiring multiple successive events (such as cleavage followed by homology-directed repair) are likely to be less efficient.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".