Systematic comparison of CRISPR/Cas9 and RNAi screens for essential genes

A side-by-side comparison of CRISPR/Cas9 and RNAi screens for essential genes reveals method-specific differences in performance. We compared the ability of short hairpin RNA (shRNA) and CRISPR/Cas9 screens to identify essential genes in the human chronic myelogenous leukemia cell line K562. We found that the precision of the two libraries in detecting essential genes was similar and that combining data from both screens improved performance. Notably, results from the two screens showed little correlation, which can be partially explained by the identification of distinct essential biological processes with each technology.