Scaled and efficient derivation of loss-of-function alleles in risk genes for neurodevelopmental and psychiatric disorders in human iPSCs

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Translating genetic findings for neurodevelopmental and psychiatric disorders (NPDs) into actionable disease biology would benefit from large-scale and unbiased functional studies of NPD genes. Leveraging the cytosine base editing (CBE) system, we developed a pipeline for clonal loss-of-function (LoF) allele mutagenesis in human induced pluripotent stem cells (hiPSCs) by introducing premature stop codons (iSTOP) that lead to mRNA nonsense-mediated decay (NMD) or protein truncation. We tested the pipeline for 23 NPD genes on 3 hiPSC lines and achieved highly reproducible, efficient iSTOP editing in 22 genes. Using RNA sequencing (RNA-seq), we confirmed their pluripotency, absence of chromosomal abnormalities, and NMD. Despite high editing efficiency, three schizophrenia risk genes (SETD1A, TRIO, and CUL1) only had heterozygous LoF alleles, suggesting their essential roles for cell growth. We found that CUL1-LoF reduced neurite branches and synaptic puncta density. This iSTOP pipeline enables a scaled and efficient LoF mutagenesis of NPD genes, yielding an invaluable shareable resource.