Profiling the genome hundreds of variations at a time

Using baker’s yeast, a team at Harvard’s Wyss Institute developed a CRISPR-Cas9-based high-throughput approach that allows researchers to precisely alter hundreds of different genes or features of a single gene at once in individual yeast cells with 80 to 100% efficiency, select cells from the population that show specific behaviors, and identify the gene alterations that either trigger or prevent them.