CRISPR-Cas9-mediated depletion of O-GlcNAc hydrolase and transferase for functional dissection of O-GlcNAcylation in human cells

O-GlcNAcylation is an abundant post-translational modification (PTM) on serine and threonine residues of nuclear and cytoplasmic proteins. Although this PTM has been reported on thousands of proteins, O-GlcNAc transferase (OGT) and hydrolase (OGA) are the only two enzymes that perform the respective addition and removal of O-GlcNAc on protein substrates. To examine the consequences of deregulated O-GlcNAcylation, the O-GlcNAc field has mostly relied on the use of RNA interference to knockdown OGT/OGA and inhibitors to block their activities in cells. Here, we describe the first complete CRISPR-Cas9 knockouts of OGA and a knockdown of OGT (with a maximal decrease in expression of over 80%) in two human cell lines. Notably, constitutive depletion of one O-GlcNAc cycling enzyme not only led to a respective increase or decrease in total O-GlcNAcylation levels but also resulted in diminished expression of the opposing enzyme, as a compensatory mechanism, observed in previous short-term pharmacological studies. The OGA knockout system presents a convenient platform to dissect OGA mutations and was used to further characterise the single Ser405 O-GlcNAc site of human OGA using the S-GlcNAc genetic recoding approach, helping to identify an S-GlcNAc-specific antibody which was previously thought to primarily detect O-GlcNAc.