Benfey Philip N, Mitchell-Olds Thomas
Department of Biology, Duke University, Durham, NC 27708, USA.
Science. 2008 Apr 25;320(5875):495-7. doi: 10.1126/science.1153716.
The promise that came with genome sequencing was that we would soon know what genes do, particularly genes involved in human diseases and those of importance to agriculture. We now have the full genomic sequence of human, chimpanzee, mouse, chicken, dog, worm, fly, rice, and cress, as well as those for a wide variety of other species, and yet we still have a lot of trouble figuring out what genes do. Mapping genes to their function is called the "genotype-to-phenotype problem," where phenotype is whatever is changed in the organism when a gene's function is altered.
基因组测序带来的希望是,我们很快就能了解基因的作用,特别是那些与人类疾病相关以及对农业至关重要的基因。我们现在已经拥有了人类、黑猩猩、小鼠、鸡、狗、蠕虫、果蝇、水稻和水芹等多种物种的完整基因组序列,以及许多其他物种的基因组序列,但我们在弄清楚基因的作用方面仍然面临诸多困难。将基因与其功能进行映射被称为“基因型到表型问题”,其中表型是指当基因功能改变时生物体中发生变化的任何特征。