I noticed that quite a few essential gens listed here are not confirmed by whole genome CRISPR library screens published by several labs. Although some of them can be confirmed in my hand. For instance, USP8 is shown to be essential and I can’t obtain USP8 KO HeLa clones in my hand. However, although HUWE1 gene is listed essential here, I can easily get HUWE1 KO HeLa clones by CRISPR. On the other hand, FAM210A is not listed as essential but I can’t obtain FAM210A KO HeLa clones by CRISPR.
Genes identified as common essentials in Achilles are those which are top depleting genes in at least 90% of cell lines included in the dataset, with the assumption that noise or contamination might cause the gene not to score the remaining 10%. This method is described in the Identifying common dependencies section of this preprint: https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/720243v1.full.
