CRISPR-mediated Isolation of Specific Megabase Segments of Genomic DNA

Megabase-sized, complex, repetitive regions of genomes are poorly studied, due to the technical and computational challenges inherent to both assembling precise reference sequences and accurately assessing structural variation across contiguous megabase DNA regions. Here we describe a strategy to overcome these challenges, CISMR (CRISPR-mediated isolation of specific megabase-sized regions of the genome), which enables us to perform targeted isolation of contiguous megabase-sized segments of the genome. Direct sequencing of the purified DNA segments can have >100-fold enrichment of the target region, thus enabling the exploration of both DNA sequence and structural diversity of complex genomic regions in any species.