Influence of nanoparticles surface coating on physicochemical properties for CRISPR gene delivery

Abstract CRISPR is a powerful gene editing tool, but its non-viral delivery approaches are still limited due to low efficacy. To improve the efficacy of plasmid loaded alginate nanoparticles, three different polymer coating, chitosan, gum Arabic and PEG were applied and studied in comparison. The surface coating highly affected physicochemical properties of the nanoparticles. Smaller size nanoparticles showed higher cellular uptake in terms of quantity and efficiency. The transfection efficiency was highly correlated with the plasmid DNA released from the nanoparticles and the nanoparticles ability to protect the plasmid DNA from degradation. The indel gene editing efficiency of the nanoparticles was related to their protection ability but not related to their transfection efficiency. These results indicated the importance of careful tuning of nanomaterial physicochemical properties as it plays the ultimate role of the carrier biological activities.