. CC-BY-NC-ND 4.0 International license It is made available under a was not peer-reviewed) is the author/funder, who has granted bioRxiv a license to display the preprint in perpetuity.The copyright holder for this preprint (which . http://dx.doi.org/10.1101/338350 doi: bioRxiv preprint first posted online Jun. 4, 2018; 3 Nitrogen-containing bisphosphonates (N-BPs) are the standard treatment for osteoporosis and several other bone diseases 11,12 . Certain N-BPs (pamidronate (Aredia®), zoledronate (Zometa®)) are also routinely prescribed to prevent skeletal complications in patients with multiple myeloma and with bone metastases from other malignancies, including breast and prostate cancer 13 . However, because N-BPs cause rare yet serious side-effects, such as atypical fractures and osteonecrosis of the jaw, many patients avoid taking them [5][6][7]11 , causing the number of prescriptions to plummet over 50% in the last decade 7,14 . Thus, there is a sizeable and growing need to better understand the genetic factors that might underlie the onand off-target clinical effects of the N-BPs.A goal of personalized medicine is to identify biomarkers that underlie drug responsiveness. In the case of the N-BPs, it can be said that there are limited personalization options owing to the limited number of genes implicated in the mechanism of action of N-BPs on bone. was not peer-reviewed) is the author/funder, who has granted bioRxiv a license to display the preprint in perpetuity.The copyright holder for this preprint (which . http://dx.doi.org/10.1101/338350 doi: bioRxiv preprint first posted online Jun. 4, 2018; 4 understanding of the molecular mechanisms by which N-BPs regulate the major bone cell types would be improved by further studies.To provide insight into the mechanism(s) of N-BPs action, we performed a genetic screen to identify human genes required for the anti-proliferative effects of N-BPs (Fig. 1a) Other genes identified in our alendronate haploid screen (SNTG1, PLCL1, and EPHB1) have been previously connected to N-BP action on bone cells and/or human bone diseases [28][29][30] . To systematically evaluate all "hits" we identified (i.e., the 185 genes with FDR p-value < 0.05, see Fig. 1b), we developed a computational approach utilizing a molecular biology-optimized version of PubMed (currently at ~27M records) to assess to what extent our haploid screen identified genes were cited as relevant to human studies that focus on bone (see "PubMed citation analysis" in the Methods section for details). We asked whether our alendronate haploid screen hits were mentioned in publications co-occurring with the term "bone" vs. other tissues along with identifiers of genome-wide screening, namely the strings, "GWAS" or "genome-wide" (Fig. 1c). Indeed, our alendronate screen hits were enriched in publications co-mentioning "bone" and genome-wide studies compared to control gene sets (Fig. 1d, Supplementary Table 1b). This . CC-BY-NC-ND 4.0 International license It is made available under a was not peer-reviewed...