Seed sequences mediate off-target activity in the CRISPR-interference system
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The CRISPR interference (CRISPRi) system is a powerful tool for selectively and efficiently silencing genes in functional genomics research applications. However, its off-target activity has not been systematically investigated. Here, we utilized a genome-wide CRISPRi-Cas9 single-guide RNA (sgRNA) library to investigate the presence of off-target activity and its effects on gene expression. Our findings suggest that off-target effects in CRISPRi are quite pervasive and have direct and indirect impacts on gene expression. Most of the identified off-targets can be accounted for by complementarity of the protospacer adjacent motif (PAM)-proximal genomic sequence with the 3' half of the sgRNA spacer sequence, the seed sequence. We also report that while the stability of off-target binding is primarily driven by the PAM-proximal seed sequences, variations in the length of these seed sequences and the degree of mismatch tolerance at various positions can differ across different sgRNAs.
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it