Scientists used their single-cell sequencing tool Perturb-seq on every expressed gene in the human genome, linking each to its job in the cell.
Genetics research has advanced rapidly over the last few decades. For example, just a few months ago scientists announced the first complete, gap-free human genome sequencing. Now researchers have advanced again, creating the first comprehensive functional map of genes that are expressed in human cells.
The Human Genome Project was an ambitious initiative to sequence every piece of human available for other scientists to use. “It’s a big resource in the way the human genome is a big resource, in that you can go in and do discovery-based research,” says Weissman, who is also a member of the Whitehead Institute and an investigator with the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. “Rather than defining ahead of time what biology you’re going to be looking at, you have this map of the genotype-phenotype relationships and you can go in and screen the database without having to do any experiments.”
CRISPR, which stands for clustered regularly-interspaced short palindromic repeats, a genome editing tool invented in 2009 made it easier than ever to edit DNA. It is easier, faster, less expensive, and more accurate than previous genetic editing methods.
The screen allowed the researchers to delve into diverse biological questions. They used it to explore the cellular effects of genes with unknown functions, to investigate the response of mitochondria to stress, and to screen for genes that cause chromosomes to be lost or gained, a phenotype that has proved difficult to study in the past. “I think this dataset is going to enable all sorts of analyses that we haven’t even thought up yet by people who come from other parts of biology, and suddenly they just have this available to draw on,” says former Weissman Lab postdoc Tom Norman, a co-senior author of the paper.
Pioneering Perturb-seq
The project takes advantage of the Perturb-seq approach that makes it possible to follow the impact of turning on or off genes with…
Read More: New Comprehensive Map Ties Every Human Gene to Its Function