Jason Moffat's lab in Toronto has published a synthetic lethal genetic interaction map for human cancer cells using panels of isogenic human HCT-116 cancer cell lines and a pooled shRNA library targeting most genes in the genome. They report a number of novel gene-specific interactions for PTEN -/-, KRAS G12D and other genotypes and do some very nice genetic and biochemical follow-up studies. Interestingly, the apoptosis inhibitor XIAP emerges as a common synthetic partner in several mutant backgrounds, although this was not a focus of the paper. Many years ago in the Boone Lab I shared a bench with Franco Vizeacoumar, the first author on this report. Nice to see what he has been doing!