BOL

A recent Nature Biotechnology paper from Chunyu Han’s lab, DNA-guided genome editing using the Natronobacterium gregoryi Argonaute, is a must-read for genome editing folks who want to learn about NgAgo. Their team sums up NgAgo’s potential pluses this way (emphasis mine):

“The useful features of NgAgo for genome editing include the following.First, it has a low tolerance to guide–target mismatch. A single nucleotide mismatch at each position of the gDNA impaired the cleavage efficiency of NgAgo, and mismatches at three positions completely blocked cleavage in our experiments. Second, 5′ phosphorylated short ssDNAs are rare in mammalian cells, which minimizes the possibility of cellular oligonucleotides misguiding NgAgo.Third, NgAgo follows a ‘one-guide-faithful’ rule, that is, a guide can only be loaded when NgAgo protein is in the process of expression, and, once loaded, NgAgo cannot swap its gDNA with other free ssDNA at 37 °C. All of these features could minimize off-target effects. Finally, it is easy to design and synthesize ssDNAs and to adjust their concentration, which is difficult with the Cas9-sgRNA system, if the sgRNA is expressed from a plasmid and the normal dosage of an ssDNA guide is only ~1/10 of that of a sgRNA expression plasmid.

NgAgo might be a more orderly way and perhaps even simpler way to go about genome editing than CRISPR, but the jury is still out on that until there are more papers and data. The NgAgo edit efficiency at this preliminary stage of technology development seems very strong. See the pics below

Reference: http://www.nature.com/nbt/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/nbt.3547.html