Stanford Cardiovascular Institute, Stanford University School of Medicine, Stanford, CA, USA.
Department of Bioengineering, Stanford University School of Medicine, Stanford, CA, USA.
Methods Mol Biol. 2021;2320:261-281. doi: 10.1007/978-1-0716-1484-6_23.
Identifying causative genes in a given phenotype or disease model is important for biological discovery and drug development. The recent development of the CRISPR/Cas9 system has enabled unbiased and large-scale genetic perturbation screens to identify causative genes by knocking out many genes in parallel and selecting cells with desired phenotype of interest. However, compared to cancer cell lines, human somatic cells including cardiomyocytes (CMs), neuron cells, and endothelial cells are not easy targets of CRISPR screens because CRISPR screens require a large number of isogenic cells to be cultured and thus primary cells from patients are not ideal. The combination of CRISPR screens with induced pluripotent stem cell (iPSC) technology would be a powerful tool to identify causative genes and pathways because iPSCs can be expanded easily and differentiated to any cell type in principle. Here we describe a robust protocol for CRISPR screening using human iPSCs. Because each screening is different and needs to be customized depending on the cell types and phenotypes of interest, we show an example of CRISPR knockdown screening using CRISPRi system to identify essential genes to differentiate iPSCs to CMs.
确定给定表型或疾病模型中的致病基因对于生物发现和药物开发非常重要。最近开发的 CRISPR/Cas9 系统使通过并行敲除许多基因并选择具有所需表型的细胞来进行无偏和大规模遗传干扰筛选成为可能,从而能够识别致病基因。然而,与癌细胞系相比,人类体细胞,包括心肌细胞 (CMs)、神经元细胞和内皮细胞,并不是 CRISPR 筛选的理想目标,因为 CRISPR 筛选需要大量的同基因细胞进行培养,因此来自患者的原代细胞并不理想。CRISPR 筛选与诱导多能干细胞 (iPSC) 技术的结合将是识别致病基因和途径的有力工具,因为 iPSC 可以很容易地扩增,并且原则上可以分化为任何细胞类型。在这里,我们描述了一种使用人 iPSC 进行 CRISPR 筛选的稳健方案。由于每个筛选都不同,并且需要根据感兴趣的细胞类型和表型进行定制,因此我们展示了一个使用 CRISPRi 系统进行 CRISPR 敲低筛选的示例,以鉴定将 iPSC 分化为 CMs 的必需基因。