A polyclonal allelic expression assay for detecting regulatory effects of transcript variants

We present an assay to experimentally test the regulatory effects of genetic variants within transcripts using CRISPR/ Cas9 followed by targeted sequencing. We applied the assay to 32 premature stop-gained variants across the genome and in two Mendelian disease genes, 33 putative causal variants of eQTLs, and 62 control variants in HEK293T cells, replicating a subset of variants in HeLa cells.