A motor-based approach to induce chromosome-specific mis-segregations in human cells

Various cancer types exhibit highly characteristic and recurrent aneuploidy patterns. The origin of these cancer type-specific karyotypes, and the extent to which they contribute to cancer progression, remains to be elucidated, partly because introducing or eliminating specific chromosomes in human cells still poses a challenge. Here, we describe a novel strategy to mis-segregate specific chromosomes at will in different human cell types. We employed Tet repressor (TetR) or nuclease dead Cas9 (dCas9) to link a plant-derived microtubule minus-end-directed kinesin (Physcomitrella patens Kinesin14VIb) to integrated Tet operon repeats and chromosome-specific endogenous repeats, respectively. By live- and fixed-cell imaging, we observed poleward movement of the targeted loci during (pro)metaphase. Kinesin14VIb-mediated pulling forces on the targeted chromosome were often counteracted by forces from kinetochore-attached microtubules. This tug of war resulted in chromosome-specific segregation errors during anaphase, and revealed that spindle forces can heavily stretch chromosomal arms. Using chromosome-specific FISH and single-cell whole genome sequencing, we established that motor-induced mis-segregations result in specific arm-level, and to a lesser extent, whole chromosome aneuploidies, after a single cell division. Our kinesin-based strategy to manipulate individual mitotic chromosomes opens up the possibility to investigate the immediate cellular responses to specific (arm level) aneuploidies in different cell types; an important step towards understanding how recurrent aneuploidy patterns arise in different cancer types.