Am I ready for CRISPR? A user's guide to genetic screens
Abstract
Exciting new technologies are often self-limiting in their rollout, as access to state-of-the-art instrumentation or the need for years of hands-on experience, for better or worse, ensures slow adoption by the community. CRISPR technology, however, presents the opposite dilemma, where the simplicity of the system enabled the parallel development of many applications, improvements and derivatives, and new users are now presented with an almost paralyzing abundance of choices. This Review intends to guide users through the process of applying CRISPR technology to their biological problems of interest, especially in the context of discovering gene function at scale.
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In human immortalized 2D cell lines, large-scale CRISPR-based genetic screens have yielded significant insights into normal and disease biology and serve as an unbiased method for investigating disease mechanisms and gene-drug interactions.
“In human immortalized 2D cell lines, large-scale CRISPR-based genetic screens have yielded significant insights into both normal and disease biology, serving as an unbiased method for investigating disease mechanisms and gene-drug interactions7,8.”
From Large-scale CRISPR screening in primary human 3D gastric organoids enables comprehensive dissection of gene-drug interactions (2025) · cites this paper as [7]
A low infection rate of 2.5% was used to ensure lentiviral integration frequency was limited to one per cell.
“To ensure that lentiviral integration frequency was limited to one per cell, weused a low infection rate of 2.5% (ref. 18)”
From Single-cell brain organoid screening identifies developmental defects in autism (2023) · cites this paper as [18]
Infection rate was controlled to be lower than 5% to prevent multiple infections.
“Infection rate was controlled to be lower than 5% to prevent multiple infections18”
From Single-cell brain organoid screening identifies developmental defects in autism (2023) · cites this paper as [18]
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- Authors
- Doench, J. G.
- Affiliations
- Broad Institute (US)
- Corresponding author
- Doench, John G.
- ORCID
- Doench, John G.
- Venue
- Nature Reviews Genetics
- Published
- 2017-12-04
- Volume
- 19
- Issue
- 2
- Pages
- 67-80
- ISSN
- 1471-0056 (ISSN-L)
- 1471-0064
- OpenAlex
- W2772524563
- Cited by
- 452
- References
- 29
- Citations by year
- 2026: 45 · 2025: 48 · 2024: 44 · 2023: 55 · 2022: 66 · 2021: 69 · 2020: 64 · 2019: 32 · 2018: 29
- FWCI
- 3.20
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- closed
- Licence
- www.springer.com/tdm (tdm)
- Locations
- Nature Reviews Genetics (publishedVersion)
- PubMed (publishedVersion)
- Topics
- Life Sciences › Biochemistry, Genetics and Molecular Biology › Molecular Biology › CRISPR and Genetic Engineering
- Life Sciences › Biochemistry, Genetics and Molecular Biology › Molecular Biology › Chromatin Remodeling and Cancer
- Life Sciences › Biochemistry, Genetics and Molecular Biology › Molecular Biology › RNA Interference and Gene Delivery
- Keywords
- CRISPR, genetic screen, functional genomics, screen design, data analysis methods, genetic engineering
- MeSH terms
- Gene Editing, Animals, Genetic Testing, Humans, CRISPR-Cas Systems
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Registry, retraction, Cites and statistics results are computed, not judged, with one exception: a printed reference that no index lists is read once by a model before it counts as a citation error. Claims are extracted by a model and kept only when their quote appears verbatim in the text; each cited source is then checked, with a model’s help, for whether it says what the claim relies on. Those verdicts can be wrong — read the claim’s quote and the cited source before relying on one.
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