In October 2004, just as the clocks were changing in Illinois, the focus of Kevin Keegan's graduate work on circadian clocks was changing, too. Keegan, a PhD student at Northwestern University in Evanston, Ill., was developing computer code to analyze preliminary data coming out of a microarray study to find Drosophila circadian rhythm genes. "On a lark," he decided to test his code on some previous circadian gene-hunting studies.
Together with his supervisor, Ravi Allada, Keegan ran the data from those five reports through his pilot algorithm, and out popped a complete surprise: many new genes that the reports had missed and had never been implicated before in daily timing. "I totally didn't expect to find a number of novel genes," he says. Quickly, the original "side project" of sifting through the existing data to find the best set of circadian genes became a top priority.
The signature of a ...
