Conditional knockout of mitochondrial protein-coding genes in rat via a DdCBE toolkit

The gene knockout technology is a very powerful tool to study gene function, only limited to nuclear genes, but not suit for mitochondrial genes. Unlike nuclear genes, mitochondrial genome has multiple copies per mammalian cell, which leads to heterogeneity among individuals with mitochondrial mutations. It is difficult to obtain a large number of samples with similar mutation loads for study. In order to conquer these obstacles, we developed a toolkit to knockout mitochondrial genome-coding genes by incorporating a premature stop codon induced by DdCBE in cells and rats.