Crab duplex-specific nuclease explained

Crab duplex-specific nuclease is a nuclease derived from the red king crab (Paralithodes camtschaticus, Kamchatka crab) hepatopancreas that displays a strong preference for cleaving double-stranded DNA and DNA in DNA–RNA hybrid duplexes, compared to single-stranded DNA.

The cleavage rate of short, perfectly matched DNA duplexes by this enzyme is essentially higher than that for non-perfectly matched duplexes of the same length. It has been applied to SNP detection^[1] and RNA normalization.^[2]

Notes and References

1. Shagin. DA . Rebrikov, DV . Kozhemyako, VB . Altshuler, IM . Shcheglov, AS . Zhulidov, PA . Bogdanova, EA . Staroverov, DB . Rasskazov, VA . Lukyanov, S. A novel method for SNP detection using a new duplex-specific nuclease from crab hepatopancreas. Genome Research. December 2002. 12. 12. 1935–42. 12466298. 10.1101/gr.547002. 187582.
2. Christodoulou. DC . Gorham, JM . Herman, DS . Seidman, JG. Construction of Normalized RNA-seq Libraries for Next-Generation Sequencing Using the Crab Duplex-Specific Nuclease . Current Protocols in Molecular Biology. April 2011. Chapter 4. Unit 4.12. 21472699. 10.1002/0471142727.mb0412s94. 3152986.