RNAi
Amazing, this is exactly what I have been studying this past week. Last week's Nature published a remarkable report from a collaboration that knocked out 16,757 individual genes of 19,427 predicted genes of C. elegans -- the first time this sort of thing has been done on an animal.
--fl
EDIT: Oh yeah, and that's not 'central dogma', it's the 'central dogmap'... :o)
Systematic functional analysis of the Caenorhabditis elegans genome using RNAi
RAVI S. KAMATH*?, ANDREW G. FRASER*?§, YAN DONG*, GINO POULIN*, RICHARD DURBIN?, MONICA GOTTA*§, ALEXANDER KANAPIN, NATHALIE LE BOT*, SERGIO MORENO*¶, MARC SOHRMANN?§, DAVID P. WELCHMAN*, PEDER ZIPPERLEN* & JULIE AHRINGER*
* Wellcome Trust/Cancer Research UK Institute and Department of Genetics, University of Cambridge, Tennis Court Road, Cambridge CB2 1QR, UK
? Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute, Hinxton, Cambridge CB10 1SA, UK
EMBL-European Bioinformatics Institute, Wellcome Trust Genome Campus, Hinxton, Cambridge CB10 1SD, UK
¶ Centro de Investigacion del Cancer, CSIC / Univ. Salamanca, Campus Miguel de Unamuno, 37007 Salamanca, Spain
? These authors contributed equally to this work
§ Present addresses: Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute, Hinxton, Cambridge CB10 1SA, UK (A.G.F.); Institute of Biochemistry ETH Hoenggerberg, 8093-Zurich, Switzerland (M.G., M.S.)..
A principal challenge currently facing biologists is how to connect the complete DNA sequence of an organism to its development and behaviour. Large-scale targeted-deletions have been successful in defining gene functions in the single-celled yeast Saccharomyces cerevisiae, but comparable analyses have yet to be performed in an animal. Here we describe the use of RNA interference to inhibit the function of 86% of the 19,427 predicted genes of C. elegans. We identified mutant phenotypes for 1,722 genes, about two-thirds of which were not previously associated with a phenotype. We find that genes of similar functions are clustered in distinct, multi-megabase regions of individual chromosomes; genes in these regions tend to share transcriptional profiles. Our resulting data set and reusable RNAi library of 16,757 bacterial clones will facilitate systematic analyses of the connections among gene sequence, chromosomal location and gene function in C. elegans.
Ref: Nature, v421, p231. (sorry, subscribers only...) |
