Disentangling biological signal from experimental noise in cellular images

However, siRNAs are known to have severe off-target effects – they not only degrade the targeted mRNA, but also can block translation of hundreds of additional mRNAs. These seed-based off-target effects dominate the signal in any siRNA-involved study, and thus to effectively model gene loss-of-function, one must use multiple siRNAs targeting each gene and a number of computational methods to determine if there is any particular gene-driven effect in an assay. As no gene is targeted by more than 1 siRNA in the RxRx1 dataset, this dataset should not be used to try to identify gene-specific knockdown effects.

Source: www.rxrx.ai