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Exploring genome space

Nature volume 405, pages 820–822 (2000)Cite this article

The completion of entire genome sequences of many experimental organisms, and the promise that the human genome will be completed in the next year, find biology suddenly awash in genome-based data. Scientists are scrambling to develop new technologies that exploit genome data to ask entirely new kinds of questions about the complex nature of living cells.

Abstract

Biology is in the midst of an intellectual and experimental sea change. Essentially the discipline is moving from being largely a data-poor science to becoming a data-rich science. The data are coming from the fortuitous confluence of technological advances in protein and DNA analysis as well as imaging advances in cell biology. Improvements in mass spectrometry have revolutionized the number and kind of proteins that can be identified in a cell, and the powerful tools of nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy and X-ray crystallography have been managing to keep pace with far more efficient methods for acquiring angstrom-level structural knowledge for individual proteins, as well as multi-protein complexes. Reports of the structure of the nucleosome1 and the RNA polymerase complex2 and the promise of a complete picture of the ribosome in the near future3,4 are landmark events in biology, and whet our appetite for more. At the same time, entire genome sequences of a large number of prokaryotes and a rapidly growing number of eukaryotes are now in hand. The exciting prospect of having a 90% draft of the human genome is almost at hand. The review articles that follow in this Nature Insight highlight some of the challenges that biologists face as they acclimatize themselves to this change in the data landscape.

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Figure 1: The distribution of genes in eukaryotic genomes.
Figure 2: Understanding gene function.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Howard Hughes Medical Institute and Department of Molecular Biology, Princeton University, Princeton, 08544, New Jersey, USA

    Ognjenka Goga Vukmirovic & Shirley M. Tilghman

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  1. Ognjenka Goga Vukmirovic
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  2. Shirley M. Tilghman
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Vukmirovic, O., Tilghman, S. Exploring genome space. Nature 405, 820–822 (2000). https://doi.org/10.1038/35015690

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