Application of CRISPR/Cas9 Gene Editing Technology in Studies of Intestinal Anaerobic Bacteria

Human intestinal bacteria play important roles in the nutrition, development, immunity and even psychological diseases of the host, researches about such microorganisms is prevalent in recent years. New omics technologies are of great help for us to explore new functions and composition of intestinal microbiome, while studies about the molecular mechanisms of the symbiosis and reciprocity between these commensals and host are significant and too, and an important approach in the field is to conduct targeted gene editing for intestinal anaerobes and verify the function of genes by knocking out, replacing or inserting genes. Although the traditional bacterial gene editing technologies show high accuracy for DNA modification, they have low recombination efficiency and a polar mutation effect. This hinders the functional researches of intestinal bacteria. CRISPR/Cas9 technology, which emerged about 10 years ago, has advantages of wide universality, simple design and operation, and has been widely used in gene manipulation of different organisms. This paper briefly introduces the technical principle of CRISPR/Cas9 and summarizes the current application of this technology in researches of intestinal anaerobic bacteria, a few aspects we are concerning and the trends for future development are analyzed as well.