The paper
R.J. Nichols et al., “Phenotypic landscape of a bacterial cell,” Cell, 144:143-56, 2011. Free F1000 Evaluation
The finding
Advances in sequencing technology have inundated scientists with genomics data but left them with a drought of corresponding phenotypes. To address this problem, first author Robert Nichols of the University of California, San Francisco, and his colleagues built a database of E. coli phenotypes and demonstrated how this database can be used to identify the functions of orphan genes—known genes without an assigned function.
The screen The researchers grew almost 4,000 bacterial mutants under 324 stress conditions, including antibiotics and other environmental stresses such as temperature and pH extremes, and quantified the growth phenotypes based on the resulting colony size. They tried to “mimic as many different stresses as we could think of and realistically screen,” said Nichols, to create a comprehensive database of the relationships between genes, environment, and ...
