Heat-triggered remote control of CRISPR-dCas9 for tunable transcriptional modulation

Abstract

Emerging CRISPR technologies are enabling powerful new approaches to control mammalian cell functions, yet the lack of spatially-defined, noninvasive modalities to direct their function limit their potential as biological tools and pose a major challenge for clinical translation. Here we confer remote control of CRISPR-dCas9 activity using thermal gene switches, enabling the dynamic regulation of gene expression using short pulses of heat to modulate transcriptional commands.