SpacerScope: binary-vectorized, genome-wide off-target profiling for RNA-guided nucleases without prior candidate-site bias

Yanji Qu, Yaxuan Wang, Yan Wang, Haoru Tang, Qing Chen · 2026

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Description

Gene editing tools can cut DNA at unintended look-alike sites, and hunting those sites across a whole genome is slow, especially in huge plant genomes. Yanji Qu and co-authors present SpacerScope in this 2026 paper, a search engine that re-encodes DNA as binary vectors for very fast screening.

Tested against human lab data, the tool recovered every one of more than six thousand confirmed off-target sites. It ran over fifty times faster than a leading rival while using little memory. In an eight-copy strawberry genome it found more candidate sites than standard web tools, showing its worth for repetitive genomes.

Catalog record

CREATORYanji Qu, Yaxuan Wang, Yan Wang, Haoru Tang, Qing Chen
YEAR2026
COLLECTIONPAPERS
FORMATTXT
FILE SIZE65 KB
VERSION1.0
LICENSECC BY 4.0
RIGHTSCC BY
SOURCEEurope PMC

Source: https://europepmc.org/articles/PMC13557715

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