The wild-type tRNA adenosine deaminase enzyme TadA is capable of sequence-specific DNA base editing

Adenine base editors (ABEs) are genome editing tools that convert AT base pairs to GC using an extensively evolved tRNA- adenosine deaminase enzyme, TadA. Here we show that wtTadA can perform DNA base editing, with a strict sequence motif requirement of TAC. We additionally investigate how the sequence recognition of TadA variants change as they accumulate mutations to better edit DNA substrates.