Isogenic pairs of cell lines, which differ by a single genetic modification, are powerful tools for understanding gene function. Generating such pairs for mammalian cells, however, is labor-intensive, time-consuming, and impossible in some cell types. Here we present an approach to create isogenic pairs of cells and screen them with genome-wide CRISPR-Cas9 libraries to generate genetic interaction maps. We queried the anti-apoptotic genes BCL2L1 and MCL1, and the DNA damage repair gene PARP1, via 25 genome-wide screens across 4 cell lines. For all three genes, we identify a rich set of both expected and novel buffering and synthetic lethal interactions. Further, we compare the interactions observed in genetic space to those found when targeting these genes with small molecules and identify hits that may inform the clinical uses for these inhibitors. We anticipate that this methodology will be broadly useful to comprehensively study genes of interest across many cell types.Genetic interaction networks can suggest functional roles of uncharacterized genes and capture subtle biological interactions, which may prove critical for interpreting genetic signal from genome-wide association studies of common disease states. Crosses of yeast knockout strains have yielded rich networks of genetic interactions, and have further shown that the shape of the network will change based on growth conditions 1-5 . In mammalian cells, the construction of such networks is orders of magnitude more complicated, due to increased genome size, the diversity of cell types, and numerous technical factors. One approach is to use either RNAi 6 or CRISPR technology 7-11 to screen a library of all possible combinatorial perturbations within a focused gene list. This approach has been used to generate genetic interaction maps for up to hundreds of genes 12 ; however, screening all combinations of protein coding genes in the human genome would require, at bare minimum, approximately 400 million perturbations and 200 billion cells, which is equivalent to 5,000 concurrent genome-wide screens with typical guide libraries and currently exceeds the practical limits of tissue culture. This scale is exacerbated by the diversity of cell types in which to study such interactions.A second, complementary approach to query genetic interactions leverages isogenic pairs of human cells, akin to mutant strains of model organisms, to enable the delineation of a given gene's contribution to phenotypes of interest. Initial gene targeting approaches in human cell lines to create even a single knockout have yielded valuable insights but were quite laborious to generate [13][14][15][16][17][18][19] . Today, CRISPR technology has made cell line engineering possible for a broad range of researchers, but that is distinct from making it easy. Creating the site-specific nuclease for Cas9 is as simple as ordering a short nucleic acid, in contrast to the more expensive and time-consuming task of assembling a customized pair of zinc finger nucleases or TALENs 20 . After design...