| Cepas---23 millones---de levadura (vía) |
Can we use what happens when a pair of genes is destroyed to find out their function? This is the question that Charles Boone and Brenda Andrews, biologists at the University of Toronto, began to ask themselves about 17 years ago. If you know what one gene is doing in the cell, and destroying it kills the cell only if another, more mysterious gene goes too — can that give you clues to what the mystery gene does?
To answer the question, they began to orchestrate a precise campaign to destroy, two by two, all the genes in yeast. Using a fleet of yeast-growing robots, they created approximately 23 million strains of yeast, each effectively missing a pair of genes. By watching to see whether the yeast lived, died or grew sickly, the researchers generated data about the existence of relationships between the genes.
