CRISPR screen for survival factors of primary effusion lymphoma cell lines

The Kaposi''s sarcoma-associated herpesvirus (KSHV) is the etiological agent for the aggressive B cell lymphoma, primary effusion lymphoma (PEL). Unlike most cancers, PELs are considered to be conditionally transformed; their transformation is driven by the presence of the viral genome and viral oncogenes. PEL cell lines are addicted to host pathways that are deregulated by these viral oncogenes. Here, we performed genome-wide CRISPR-based knockout screens to identify cellular genes that are essential for the survival of PEL cell lines. We used the previously described GeCKO V2 (Sanjana, Shalem, and Zhang, Nature Methods 2014) and Brunello libraries (Doench et al., Nature Biotechnology 2016) to analyze a total of nine PEL cell lines, a Burkitt's lymphoma cell line, and a multiple myeloma cell line.