Chemical genomics or chemogenomics is a powerful approach to study the response of cells to chemical perturbations. Genome-wide CRISPR-Cas9 genetic screens in human cells can systematically identify all gene knockouts that either suppress (rescue) or enhance (sensitize) compound effects on cell proliferation. This information can directly establish compound mechanism-of-action and identify all genes that function in the cellular process affected by the compound.

After assessing the growth inhibition of your favourite compound in our standard pre-B lymphocytic human cell line at the IRIC's High Throughput Screening Facility, we will grow our custom CRISPR/Cas9 genome-wide KO pool library in the presence of your compound. After outgrowth, sgRNA sequences are amplified from the cell population and sequenced at the IRIC's Genomics platform. Our custom bioinformatics pipeline then converts changes in sgRNA frequencies before and after compound treatment to statistically compute robust enrichment or depletion scores for all genes. The approach has already been used to characterize hundreds of drugs and other bioactive compounds, which serve as a baseline for interpreting your screen data. Our CRISPR screening platform has identified the targets of many uncharacterized compounds, revealing off-target effects for known drugs, and assigned functions to many previously uncharacterized genes.