Large-scale biology once conjured images of brute-force genetic screens resulting in collections of mutants. More recently, it has meant genome sequencing on unprecedented scales. But today, as this issue's Hot Papers demonstrate, the leading edge in large-scale biology is proteomics. As in the large-scale efforts of the past, researchers rely on simple model organisms to develop their methods. In the proteomics push, brewer's yeast, Saccharomyces cerevisiae, is creating yet another mold.
"[It has been] a huge leg up to have [the yeast genome] available for the last seven years," says John Yates III, a professor at The Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla, Calif. "The genome itself is relatively simple ... and gene prediction is pretty accurate ... people have made reagents where every yeast protein is fused to other domains like GST [glutathione S-transferase] and GFP [green fluorescent protein] ... and now the deletion set is available." Yates says ...
