New CRISPR-based Map Ties Every Human Gene To Its Function

In 2003, the Human Genome Project finished sequencing every bit of human DNA, remembers MIT News.

'Now, over two decades later, MIT Professor Jonathan Weissman and colleagues have gone beyond the sequence to present the first comprehensive functional map of genes that are expressed in human cells.'
The data from this project, published online June 9 in Cell, ties each gene to its job in the cell, and is the culmination of years of collaboration on the single-cell sequencing method Perturb-seq.

The data are 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....

'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.

The announcement credits the single-sequencing tool Perturb-seq and CRISPR-Cas9 genome editing which introduced genetic changes into cells and then captured information about which RNAs expressed (uses single-cell RNA sequencing).

The researchers scaled the method to the entire genome using human blood cancer cell lines and noncancerous cells derived from the retina, ultimately using Perturb-seq across more than 2.5 million cells.

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