This protocol describes methods for increasing and evaluating the efficiency of genome editing based on the CRISPR-Cas9 (clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats-CRISPR-associated 9) system, transcription activator-like effector nucleases (TALENs) or zinc-finger nucleases (ZFNs). First, Indel Detection by Amplicon Analysis (IDAA) determines the size and frequency of insertions and deletions elicited by nucleases in cells, tissues or embryos through analysis of fluorophore-labeled PCR amplicons covering the nuclease target site by capillary electrophoresis in a sequenator. Second, FACS enrichment of cells expressing nucleases linked to fluorescent proteins can be used to maximize knockout or knock-in editing efficiencies or to balance editing efficiency and toxic/off-target effects. The two methods can be combined to form a pipeline for cell-line editing that facilitates the testing of new nuclease reagents and the generation of edited cell pools or clonal cell lines, reducing the number of clones that need to be generated and increasing the ease with which they are screened. The pipeline shortens the time line, but it most prominently reduces the workload of cell-line editing, which may be completed within 4 weeks.

Targeted endonucleases including zinc finger nucleases (ZFNs) and clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats (CRISPRs)/Cas9 are increasingly being used for genome editing in higher species. We therefore devised a broadly applicable and versatile method for increasing editing efficiencies by these tools. Briefly, 2A peptide-coupled co-expression of fluorescent protein and nuclease was combined with fluorescence-activated cell sorting (FACS) to allow for efficient isolation of cell populations with increasingly higher nuclease expression levels, which translated into increasingly higher genome editing rates. For ZFNs, this approach, combined with delivery of donors as single-stranded oligodeoxynucleotides and nucleases as messenger ribonucleic acid, enabled high knockin efficiencies in demanding applications, including biallelic codon conversion frequencies reaching 30–70% at high transfection efficiencies and ∼2% at low transfection efficiencies, simultaneous homozygous knockin mutation of two genes with ∼1.5% efficiency as well as generation of cell pools with almost complete codon conversion via three consecutive targeting and FACS events. Observed off-target effects were minimal, and when occurring, our data suggest that they may be counteracted by selecting intermediate nuclease levels where off-target mutagenesis is low, but on-target mutagenesis remains relatively high. The method was also applicable to the CRISPR/Cas9 system, including CRISPR/Cas9 mutant nickase pairs, which exhibit low off-target mutagenesis compared to wild-type Cas9.