Fig. 5

CRIPSR-Cas9 assisted depletion of haemoglobin transcripts. a A schematic diagram of in vitro CRISPR-Cas9 assisted depletion of haemoglobin transcripts. Green and black coloured poly-A tail mRNA represent haemoglobin transcripts and parasite transcripts respectively. After reverse transcription and amplification (5 cycles of PCR), gRNA-Cas9 assisted depletion of haemoglobin cDNA was performed (yellow stars). b Successful depletion of HBB, HBA1, HBA2 haemoglobin transcripts shown as transcripts per million (TPM) as measured by RNA sequencing for 1 and 0.1% ring stage iRBCs. c Total number of P. falciparum transcripts detected in 1 and 0.1% ring stage iRBCs in the presence or absence of gRNA-Cas9 assisted depletion. d P. falciparum unique reads count expressed as TPM shown in the presence or absence of gRNA-Cas9 assisted depletion. For all graphs, untreated samples (black) were subjected to 19 cycles of amplification only, treated samples (grey) were amplified for 5 cycles, treated with gRNA-Cas9 and then amplified for additional 14 cycles