Novel integrative genetic screening platform offers insights into role of DNA accessibility in cancer
In a new resource for the scientific community, published today in
Nature Biotechnology, researchers in the lab of Neville Sanjana, PhD, at the New York Genome Center (NYGC) and New York University (NYU) developed CRISPR-sciATAC, a novel integrative genetic screening platform that jointly captures CRISPR gene perturbations and single-cell chromatin accessibility genome-wide.
With this technology, they profile changes in genome organization and create a large-scale atlas of how loss of individual chromatin-altering enzymes impacts the human genome. The new method harnesses the programmability of the gene editing system CRISPR to knock-out nearly all chromatin-related genes in parallel, offering researchers deeper insights into the role of DNA accessibility in cancer and in rare diseases involving chromatin.