High-throughput functional evaluation of human cancer-associated mutations using base editors

Younggwang Kim, Seungho Lee, Soohyuk Cho, Jinman Park, Dongwoo Chae, Taeyoung Park, John D. Minna, Hyongbum Henry Kim

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

30 Scopus citations

Abstract

Comprehensive phenotypic characterization of the many mutations found in cancer tissues is one of the biggest challenges in cancer genomics. In this study, we evaluated the functional effects of 29,060 cancer-related transition mutations that result in protein variants on the survival and proliferation of non-tumorigenic lung cells using cytosine and adenine base editors and single guide RNA (sgRNA) libraries. By monitoring base editing efficiencies and outcomes using surrogate target sequences paired with sgRNA-encoding sequences on the lentiviral delivery construct, we identified sgRNAs that induced a single primary protein variant per sgRNA, enabling linking those mutations to the cellular phenotypes caused by base editing. The functions of the vast majority of the protein variants (28,458 variants, 98%) were classified as neutral or likely neutral; only 18 (0.06%) and 157 (0.5%) variants caused outgrowing and likely outgrowing phenotypes, respectively. We expect that our approach can be extended to more variants of unknown significance and other tumor types.

Original languageEnglish (US)
Pages (from-to)874-884
Number of pages11
JournalNature biotechnology
Volume40
Issue number6
DOIs
StatePublished - Jun 2022

ASJC Scopus subject areas

  • Biotechnology
  • Bioengineering
  • Applied Microbiology and Biotechnology
  • Molecular Medicine
  • Biomedical Engineering

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