CRISPR-SURF: discovering regulatory elements by deconvolution of CRISPR tiling screen data

Abstract

Tiling screens that use CRISPR-Cas technologies provide a powerful approach for the mapping of regulatory elements to phenotypes of interest1–6. Here we present CRISPR screening uncharacterized region function (CRISPR-SURF), a deconvolution framework that can be used to identify functional regulatory regions in the genome from data generated by CRISPR-Cas nuclease, CRISPR interference (CRISPRi), or CRISPR activation (CRISPRa) tiling screens. CRISPR-SURF can be run as a stand-alone command line utility (https://github.com/pinellolab/CRISPR-SURF) or as a web application (http://crisprsurf.pinellolab.org/)