February 4th, 2020 : Dr. Leopold Parts

SEMINAR

Dr. Leopold Parts
Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute, UK

“Scaling up CRISPR/Cas screens to measure natural variation in human gene essentiality”

Genetic screens based on CRISPR/Cas technology are a powerful tool for understanding cellular phenotypes. However, the coverage and replicate requirements result in large experiment sizes, which are limiting when samples are scarce, or the protocols are expensive and laborious. I will discuss our attempts to reduce the scale of genome-wide screens, with the aim of rendering hundreds of them achievable in human induced pluripotent stem cells. To do so, we measure and predict Cas9 editing outcomes, build a statistical model of noise and information sharing across many CRISPR/Cas experiments, and design a reduced gRNA library that allows evaluating two edits in each cell. I will also present preliminary findings from using these advances to measure the variation in gene essentiality in cells from tens of healthy donors.

Tuesday February 4th 2020
At 4pm

GĂ©nopode Building
Auditorium A

All the interested people are cordially invited.
Host : Prof. Jolanda van Leeuwen