Scientists are revealing the deepest annotations of the genomes of two of the most widely used model organisms in biology: __Caenorhabditis elegans__ and __Drosophila melanogaster__.
The findings appear this week in linkurl:two;http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/nature09725.html linkurl:papers;http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/nature09715.html in Nature and linkurl:one;http://www.sciencemag.org/content/early/2010/12/21/science.1196914 in Science. Launched in 2007 by the National Human Genome Research Institute, modENCODE aims to identify and map out all the functional elements of the __C. elegans__ and __D. melanogaster__ genomes. That includes the entire chromatin landscape as well as all the RNA transcripts, transcription factors, small RNAs, and origins of replications. Its complementary program, linkurl:ENCODE,;http://www.the-scientist.com/news/display/53280/ aims to do the same with the human genome.In a statistical and experimental tour de force, the modENCODE Consortium pulled together more than 700 gene expression data sets for __D. melanogaster__ and 237 for __Caenorhabditis elegans__ across several developmental stages."It's amazingly extensive work," said linkurl:David Fitch,;http://biology.as.nyu.edu/object/DavidFitch a geneticist at New York...
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Image: Wikimedia commons |
C. elegansC. elegans
NatureB.R. Graveley et al., "The developmental transcriptome of Drosophila melanogaster," Nature, doi:10.1038/nature09715, 2010.P.V. Kharchenko et al., "Comprehensive analysis of the chromatin landscape in Drosophila melanogaster," Nature, doi:10.1038/nature09725, 2010.M.B. Gerstein et al., "Integrative analysis of the Caenorhabditis elegans genome by the modENCODE Project," Science, 330: 1775-87, 2010.
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Image: Wikimedia commons |
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