Functional Screening of Candidate Causal Genes for Insulin Resistance in Human Preadipocytes and Adipocytes.

Genome-wide association studies have identified genetic loci associated with insulin resistance (IR) but pinpointing the causal genes of a risk locus has been challenging. To identify candidate causal genes for IR, we screened regional and biologically plausible genes (16 in total) near the top 10 IR-loci in risk-relevant cell types, namely preadipocytes and adipocytes. We generated 16 human Simpson-Golabi-Behmel syndrome preadipocyte knockout lines each with a single IR-gene knocked out by lentivirus-mediated CRISPR (clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats)/Cas9 system.