Rapid Proteomic Screen of CRISPR Experiment Outcome by Data Independent Acquisition Mass Spectrometry: A Case Study for HMGN1

CRISPR-Cas gene editing holds substantial promise in many biomedical disciplines and basic research. Due to the important functional implications of non-histone chromosomal protein HMG-14 (HMGN1) in regulating chromatin structure and tumor immunity, we performed gene knockout of HMGN1 by CRISPR in cancer cells and studied the following proteomic regulation events. In particular we utilized DIA mass spectrometry (DIA-MS) and reproducibly measured more than 6200 proteins (protein- FDR 1%) and more than 82,000 peptide precursors in the single MS shots of two hours. HMGN1 protein deletion was confidently verified in all of the clone- and dish- replicates following CRISPR by DIA-MS. Statistical analysis revealed 144 proteins changed their expressions significantly after HMGN1 knockout. Functional annotation and enrichment analysis indicate the deletion of HMGN1 induces the histone inactivation, various stress pathways, remodeling of extracellular proteomes, and immune regulation processes related to complement and coagulation cascade and interferon alpha/ gamma response in cancer cells. These results shed new lights on the cellular functions of HMGN1. We suggest that DIA-MS can be reliably used as a rapid, robust, and cost-effective proteomic-screening tool to assess the outcome of the CRISPR experiments.