Genome-wide single-cell perturbation screens with VIPerturb-seq

Abstract

CRISPR-based screening combined with single-cell sequencing (i.e., Perturb-seq) enables systematic mapping of genetic perturbations to molecular phenotypes. While Perturb-seq is well-suited to profile targeted subsets of regulators, scaling to genome-wide screens presents substantial cost and throughput challenges. Here we introduce VIPerturb-seq, a platform to facilitate routine genome-wide Perturb-seq experiments using probe-based detection workflows. We describe a split probe strategy for detection of genome-wide CRISPR libraries in fixed cells that enables (i) support for phenotypic enrichment of Very Important Perturbations (VIPs) prior to single-cell profiling, and (ii) compatibility with combinatorial indexing workflows to further improve Perturb-seq throughput by 50-fold. Using a genome-wide CRISPRi library (GuEST-List), we demonstrate VIPerturb-seq on three genome-wide screens representing both unbiased and phenotypically enriched workflows. Our results demonstrate how the sensitivity, scalability, and efficiency of VIPerturb-seq can enable both individual labs with targeted research questions and large data generation platforms aiming to construct virtual cells.