Zhang Ren, Lin Yan
Department of Epidemiology and Biostatistics, Tianjin Cancer Institute and Hospital, Tianjin 300060, China.
Nucleic Acids Res. 2009 Jan;37(Database issue):D455-8. doi: 10.1093/nar/gkn858. Epub 2008 Oct 30.
Essential genes are those indispensable for the survival of an organism, and their functions are therefore considered a foundation of life. Determination of a minimal gene set needed to sustain a life form, a fundamental question in biology, plays a key role in the emerging field, synthetic biology. Five years after we constructed DEG, a database of essential genes, DEG 5.0 has significant advances over the 2004 version in both the number of essential genes and the number of organisms in which these genes are determined. The number of prokaryotic essential genes in DEG has increased about 10-fold, mainly owing to genome-wide gene essentiality screens performed in a wide range of bacteria. The number of eukaryotic essential genes has increased more than 5-fold, because DEG 1.0 only had yeast ones, but DEG 5.0 also has those in humans, mice, worms, fruit flies, zebrafish and the plant Arabidopsis thaliana. These updates not only represent significant advances of DEG, but also represent the rapid progress of the essential-gene field. DEG is freely available at the website http://tubic.tju.edu.cn/deg or http://www.essentialgene.org.
必需基因是生物体生存所不可或缺的，因此其功能被视为生命的基础。确定维持一种生命形式所需的最小基因集，这一生物学中的基本问题，在新兴领域合成生物学中发挥着关键作用。在我们构建必需基因数据库DEG五年后，DEG 5.0在必需基因数量以及确定这些基因的生物体数量方面相较于2004版都有显著进展。DEG中 prokaryotic必需基因的数量增加了约10倍，这主要归功于在多种细菌中进行的全基因组基因必需性筛选。真核生物必需基因的数量增加了5倍多，因为DEG 1.0只有酵母的必需基因，而DEG 5.0还包含人类、小鼠、线虫、果蝇、斑马鱼和植物拟南芥中的必需基因。这些更新不仅代表了DEG的重大进展，也代表了必需基因领域的快速发展。可在网站http://tubic.tju.edu.cn/deg或http://www.essentialgene.org免费获取DEG。
