MPUSP/snakemake-crispr-guides

A Snakemake workflow for the design of small guide RNAs (sgRNAs) for CRISPR applications.

Overview

Testing:

Last update: 2026-03-20

Latest release: v1.7.0

Topics: bioinformatics-pipeline crispr crispr-design guide-rna-library python3 r-markdown snakemake workflow snakemake-workflow

Authors: @m-jahn @rabioinf

Configuration

The following configuration details are extracted from the config's README file.

---

Running the workflow

Input data

The workflow requires the following input:

1. An NCBI Refseq ID, e.g. GCF_000006945.2. Find your genome assembly and corresponding ID on NCBI genomes
2. OR use a custom pair of *.fasta file and *.gff file that describe the genome of choice

Important requirements when using custom *.fasta and *.gff files:

• *.gff genome annotation must have the same chromosome/region name as the *.fasta file (example: NC_003197.2)
• *.gff genome annotation must have gene and CDS type annotation that is automatically parsed to extract transcripts
• *.gff genome annotation must have additional qualifiers Name=..., ID=..., and Parent=... for CDSs
• all chromosomes/regions in the *.gff genome annotation must be present in the *.fasta sequence
• but not all sequences in the *.fasta file need to have annotated genes in the *.gff file

Target type

One of the most important options is to specify the type of target with the target_type parameter. The pipeline can generate up to three different types of guide RNAs:

1. guides for targets - these are typically genes, promoters or other annotated genetic elements determined from the supplied GFF file. The pipeline will try to find the best guides by position and score targeting the defined window around the start of the gene/feature (parameter tss_window). The number of guides is specified with filter_best_per_gene.
2. guides for intergenic regions - for non-annotated regions (or in the absence of any targets), the pipeline attempts to design guide RNAs using a 'tiling' approach. This means that the supplied genome is subdivided into 'tiles' (bins) of width tiling_window, and the best guide RNAs per window are selected. The number of guides is specified with filter_best_per_tile.
3. guides not targeting anything - this type of guide RNAs is most useful as negative control, in order to gauge the effect of the genetic background on mutant selection without targeting a gene. These guides are random nucleotide sequences with the same length as the target guide RNAs. The no-target control guides are named NTC_<number> and exported in a separate table (results/filter_guides/guideRNAs_ntc.csv). Some very reduced checks are done for these guides, such as off-target binding. mMst on-target checks are omitted for these guides as they have no defined binding site, strand, or other typical guide properties.

Off-target scores

The pipeline maps each guide RNA to the target genome and -by default- counts the number of alternative alignments with 1, 2, 3, or 4 mismatches. All guide RNAs that map to any other position including up to 4 allowed mismatches are removed. An exception to this rule is made for guides that perfectly match multiple targets when the filter_multi_targets is set to False (default: True). The reasoning behind this rule is that genomes often contain duplicated genes/targets, and the default but sometimes undesired behavior is to remove all guides targeting the two or more duplicates. If set to False, these guides will not be removed and duplicated genes will be targeted even if they are located at different sites.

On-target scores

The list of available on-target scores in the R crisprScore package is larger than the different scores included by default. It is important to note that the computation of some scores does not necessarily make sense for the design of every CRISPR library. For example, several scores were obtained from analysis of Cas9 cutting efficiency in human cell lines. For such scores it is questionable if they are useful for the design of a different type of library, for example a dCas9 CRISPR inhibition library for bacteria.

Another good reason to exclude some scores are the computational resources they require. Particularly deep learning-derived scores are calculated by machine learning models that require both a lot of extra resources in terms of disk space (downloaded and installed via basilisk and conda environments) and processing power (orders of magnitude longer computation time).

Users can look up all available scores on the R crisprScore GitHub page and decide which ones should be included. In addition, the default behavior of the pipeline is to compute an average score and select the top N guides based on it. The average score is the weighted mean of all single scores and the score_weights can be defined in the config/config.yml file. If a score should be excluded from the ranking, it's weight can simply be set to zero.

The default scores are:

• ruleset1, ruleset3, crisprater, and crisprscan from the crisprScore package
• tssdist as an additional score representing the relative distance to the promoter. Only relevant for CRISRPi repression
• genrich as an additional score representing the G enrichment in the -4 to -14 nt region of a spacer (Miao & Jahn et al., 2023). Only relevant for CRISPRi repression

Strand specificity

The strand specificity is important for some CRISPR applications. In contrast to the crisprDesign package, functions were added to allow the design of guide RNAs that target either both strands, or just the coding (non-template) strand, or the template strand. This can be defined with the strands parameter in the config file.

• For CRISPRi (inhibition) experiments, the literature recommends to target the coding strand for the CDS or both strands for the promoter (Larson et al., Nat Prot, 2013)
• this pipeline will automatically filter guides for the chosen strand
• for example, if only guides for the coding (non-template) strand are desired, genes on the "+" strand will be targeted with reverse-complement guides ("-"), and genes on the "-" strand with "+" guides.