(A) A schematic diagram of the genome-wide siRNA screen including the primary screen, data mining, hit selection, secondary screen, and validation of several selected targets. In the primary screen, reporter cells were transfected with siRNA in 384-well plates followed by kinetic bioluminescence recording (see Experimental Procedures for details). Luminescence data were analyzed to obtain circadian parameters and select primary hits. Secondary screen and validation studies were performed to confirm circadian phenotypes of hits and to demonstrate the validity of the primary screen. To catalyze the use of this dataset by the research community, we constructed a comprehensive circadian genomic screen database in BioGPS (see Figure S6 for details).
(B) Distribution of circadian parameters of the entire primary screen. Dots represent normalized period (upper) and amplitude values (lower). For period length, the average of duplicate wells was divided by the mean of the entire screen and indicated in Log2 space. The cut-off was −0.1 and +0.1 (corresponding to raw data 23.55 hr for short- and 26.85 hr for long-period hits). Traces that lack apparent ~24 hr bioluminescence oscillation usually returned as a period length of 48 hr and are considered as arrhythmic. In addition, Log2 values above 0.4 (corresponding to 38 hr), for example, display poor curve fitting and are also considered as arrhythmic. For rhythm amplitude, average of duplicate wells was divided by the mean of the entire screen, and the cut-off was 2.20 (corresponding to raw data 7390) for high-amplitude hits. The knockdown phenotypes of several representative clock genes are shown in colored dots.
(C) Cellular clock phenotypes of siRNA knockdown of known clock genes. Plots of cellular oscillations upon knockdown of BMAL1, CLOCK, PER1, PER2, CRY1 or CRY2 by 2 independent pairs of siRNAs in the primary screen are presented. The spikes of initial 10 hr bioluminescence readings resulted from media change and were removed from the plot.