Genome-wide CRISPR-Cas9 screen analyzed by SLIDER identifies network of repressor complexes that regulate TRIM24

Summary: TRIM24 is an oncogenic chromatin reader that is frequently overexpressed in human tumors and associated with poor prognosis. However, TRIM24 is rarely mutated, duplicated, or rearranged in cancer. This raises questions about how TRIM24 is regulated and what changes in its regulation are responsible for its overexpression. Here, we perform a genome-wide CRISPR-Cas9 screen by fluorescence-activated cell sorting (FACS) that nominated 220 negative regulators and elucidated a regulatory network that includes the KAP1 corepressor, CNOT deadenylase, and GID/CTLH E3 ligase. Knocking out required components of these three complexes caused TRIM24 overexpression, confirming their negative regulation of TRIM24. Our findings identify regulators of TRIM24 that nominate previously unexplored contexts for this oncoprotein in biology and disease. These findings were enabled by SLIDER, a new scoring system designed and vetted in our study as a broadly applicable tool for analysis of CRISPR screens performed by FACS