Silencing the Large Majority of Genes in the Human Genome

There's a few thousand genes that when you silence, cause cells to die or grow slowly and the remaining 18,000 or so don't have an effect on growth. So we target all 20,000 and in a pooled experiment measure for each of these, whether they're affecting the growth or not. And ask, are the ones targeting the genes that are essential, causing the cells to grow poorly? We had a very high degree of precision and we measured this by more direct molecular techniques on a few loci as well. This is really what gave us confidence that we didn't have just a prototype approach, but we really had a robust approach for specifically silencing the large majority of genes