CRISPR-DT: designing gRNAs for the CRISPR-Cpf1 system with improved target efficiency and specificity.

Motivation: The CRISPR-Cpf1 system has been successfully applied in genome editing. However, target efficiency of the CRISPR-Cpf1 system varies among different gRNA sequences.

Results: In this study, we reanalyzed the published CRISPR-Cpf1 gRNAs data and found many sequence and structural features related to their target efficiency. With the aid of Random Forest in feature selection, a support vector machine (SVM) model was created to predict target efficiency for any given gRNAs. We have developed the first CRISPR-Cpf1 web service application, CRISPR-DT (CRISPR DNA Targeting), to help users design optimal gRNAs for the CRISPR-Cpf1 system by considering both target efficiency and specificity. CRISPR-DT will empower researchers in genome editing.

Availability and implementation: CRISPR-DT, mainly implemented in Perl, PHP and JavaScript, is freely available at https://bioinfolab.miamioh.edu/CRISPR-DT.

Supplementary information: Supplementary data are available in Supplementary.Info.pdf.