The paper
M. Costanzo et al., “The genetic landscape of a cell,” Science, 327:425–31, 2010. http://bit.ly/genlandscape
The finding
Knocking out a single gene in yeast often has little effect; yeast can survive with only about 20% of their 6,000 genes intact and researchers often need to knock out a second gene at random to determine function. Now, a network map of over 5 million such double mutants makes it possible to predict the function of 75% of the yeast genome.
The challenge
To measure the effects of double mutants, the researchers, coordinated by Charles Boone at the University of Toronto, looked at the size of yeast colonies. Very small colonies indicated that the genes were closely related or essential to the same pathway, while slightly larger colonies signified that one mutant negated the effect of the other. Simple though it sounds, it took a couple of years just to figure ...
