Grant: Operating Grant

Genome sequencing projects have revealed the massive catalogue of genes in a variety of organisms, from yeast to man. Biologists are faced with a major challenge as they confront this embarrassment of riches; how to assign functions to thousands of uncharacterized genes, and how to use this information to identify the proteins that function together to regulate fundamental cellular processes. Functional genomics technologies enable researchers to study all genes simultaneously and systematically in a specific assay and their development and application is providing unprecedented global views of gene function in healthy and diseased cells. We are developing novel genomics technologies and applying them in large-scale studies using a yeast model system. Yeast are single celled microorganisms that are related to humans evolutionarily, with thousands of genes homologous to those in humans. Our systematic approaches will accelerate the pace of yeast research and provide proof-of-principle analyses for analogous approaches in more complex cells and organisms.