Selecting the right target for drug discovery is a crucial decision. Using Horizon’s CRISPR–Cas9 based medium-throughput target essentiality assay you can determine whether your drug target is essential in biologically relevant cell lines.
This is how it works - your gene of interest will be disrupted using the nuclease activity of the CRISPR–Cas9 gene-editing system followed by single cell dilution, culture of colonies from single cells, and analysis of gene disruption status in viable clones. This has an advantage over traditional RNAi-based target validation assays in which incomplete knockdown can lead to ambiguous results.
How does the Target Essentiality Profiling work?
- 53 different cell lines have been pre-evaluated for this assay. If your cell line of choice is not within this list an additional phase can be included to evaluate your chosen cell line(s) for suitability
- If an efficient guide RNA has not been previously identified for your target gene, we will include a guide design and/or evaluation phase
- Should the copy number of your gene of interest be greater than diploid we can increase the number of colonies screened to account for the expected increased diversity of edited vs non-edited alleles
Related information:
| Learn how Target Essentiality Screening can help your research by viewing our webinar | |
| Read how this assay was used to establish essentiality of EZh4 in the SMARCB1-negative (G-401) MRT cell line |