# Co-dependency list for essential genes

**URL:** <https://forum.depmap.org/t/co-dependency-list-for-essential-genes/696>\
**Category:** Q&A\
**Created:** [June 28, 2021, 8:25pm UTC](https://forum.depmap.org/t/co-dependency-list-for-essential-genes/696 "2021-06-28T20:25:50Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 3\
**Page:** 1

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**Author:** ![FMattiroli](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/f/ba9def/32.png) [@FMattiroli](https://forum.depmap.org/u/FMattiroli)\
**Post date:** [June 28, 2021, 8:25pm UTC](https://forum.depmap.org/t/co-dependency-list-for-essential-genes/696/1 "2021-06-28T20:25:50Z")

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Hi there, sorry if this question is naive.  
when looking at the co-dependency list for an essential gene. What are the chances that the (top) hits are in the list simply because they are also essential genes? Or is there a way the data is corrected for this and it selects for functional co-dependency?  
thanks in advance!

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**Author:** ![jmmcfarl](https://yyz1.discourse-cdn.com/flex035/user_avatar/forum.depmap.org/jmmcfarl/32/16_2.png) [@jmmcfarl](https://forum.depmap.org/u/jmmcfarl)\
**Post date:** [June 28, 2021, 9:53pm UTC](https://forum.depmap.org/t/co-dependency-list-for-essential-genes/696/2 "2021-06-28T21:53:01Z")

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This is a great question. In general, there is a risk of confounding factors (like overall screen quality) having a significant impact on measured correlations among common-essential genes in particular (See for example our paper [here](https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-018-06916-5) for descriptions of this with RNAi data, and similar issues can arise with CRISPR data).  
We believe that our latest data processing methods do a good job of removing these biases in order to maximize the ability to identify meaningful relationships among common-essential genes, but it’s hard to rule out such effects.

In general, we and others do find that there is quite a bit of biologically meaningful signal present among co-dependency relationships for common-essential genes. So I’d probably recommend using this info, but keep potential limitations of the data in mind particularly when assessing patterns within the common-essential gene sets as the results can be more dependent on the choice of data normalization and processing methods.

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**Author:** ![FMattiroli](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/f/ba9def/32.png) [@FMattiroli](https://forum.depmap.org/u/FMattiroli)\
**Post date:** [June 29, 2021, 7:06am UTC](https://forum.depmap.org/t/co-dependency-list-for-essential-genes/696/3 "2021-06-29T07:06:01Z")

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Thank you very much, this response is very helpful!