Charles Perou views scanned gene-expression microarray images with LIsa Cary and Katherine Hoadley in his lab at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.UNC LINEBERGER COMPREHENSIVE CANCER CENTER
If you want to know what a cell, tissue, or organism is doing, molecularly speaking, you don’t look at its genome; you’ve got to look further downstream.
One option: the transcriptome. One step beyond the genome, a transcriptome represents the sum total of RNAs expressed in a cell (or tissue, or organ, or organism) under a given set of conditions. If the genome is a set of instructions for all the proteins and regulatory molecules an organism can produce, the transcriptome indicates which ones it actually produces. And these days, collecting such data is almost trivial.
Generated by using either gene-expression microarrays or “next-generation” DNA sequencing (an application called “RNA-Seq”), transcriptome data can be used to pinpoint genes whose expression levels rise or fall in ...
