It's just before noon in a narrow lab at Tufts School of Veterinary Medicine in North Grafton, Mass., and Naomi Balaban and her postdoc Kiran Madanahally have just opened a package they've waited two months for. The package, from a genomics company in Iceland, is the microarray analysis of a knockout Bacillus cereus bacterium deficient in one protein in a signaling pathway that produces enterotoxins. "These results are fantastic," says Madanahally, staring at the computer screen in front of him.
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"Really?" Balaban says as she quickly strides to where Madanahally sits. Balaban's eyes light up as her smile widens. The screen shows a graph containing a cluster of rainbow-colored dots along a regression line, with several dots slung at the bottom right of the screen, to which Madanahally is pointing. "Those are the toxins," he says. Balaban grips his shoulder in excitement: "That's amazing." The dots represent genes expressed in...