Entry Date:
January 26, 2016

Efficient Combinatorial Screening of Candidate Autism Variants Enabled by RNA Optical Barcoding

Principal Investigator Paul Blainey

Co-investigator Feng Zhang


The majority of ASD is not associated with a single genetic variant. Genome-wide association of multiple rare variants is plagued by low signal to noise in genetically heterogeneous backgrounds. In principle, functional genomics allows testing of putative rare variants against a uniform genetic background in vitro. However, while activating and inactivating single genes up to genome-scale is feasible with existing technology, efficient screening of multiple interacting genes for important neural phenotypes is not. Here we propose to establish proof-of-concept for a new approach that screens a diverse set of multi-genic perturbations for complex phenotypes by microscopy, and allows optical identification of the genotypes from the same image dataset.