Chronic Pseudomonas Infections, Helmholtz Center for Infection Research, Braunschweig, Germany.
PLoS Pathog. 2010 Aug 26;6(8):e1001074. doi: 10.1371/journal.ppat.1001074.
Once the genome sequence of an organism is obtained, attention turns from identifying genes to understanding their function, their organization and control of metabolic pathways and networks that determine its physiology. Recent technical advances in acquiring genome-wide data have led to substantial progress in identifying gene functions. However, we still do not know the function of a large number of genes and, even when a gene product has been assigned to a functional class, we cannot normally predict its contribution to the phenotypic behaviour of the cell or organism--the phenome. In this study, we assessed bacterial growth parameters of 4030 non-redundant PA14 transposon mutants in the pathogenic bacterium Pseudomonas aeruginosa. The genome-wide simultaneous analysis of 119 distinct growth-related phenotypes uncovered a comprehensive phenome and provided evidence that most genotypes are not phenotypically isolated but rather define specific complex phenotypic clusters of genotypes. Since phenotypic overlap was demonstrated to reflect the relatedness of genotypes on a global scale, knowledge of an organism's phenome might significantly contribute to the advancement of functional genomics.
一旦获得生物体的基因组序列，人们的注意力就会从识别基因转向理解它们的功能、组织以及控制代谢途径和网络，这些途径和网络决定了它的生理学特性。最近在获取全基因组数据方面的技术进步，使得鉴定基因功能方面取得了实质性的进展。然而，我们仍然不知道大量基因的功能，即使一个基因产物被分配到一个功能类别，我们通常也不能预测它对细胞或生物体表型行为的贡献——表型组。在这项研究中，我们评估了 4030 个非冗余 PA14 转座子突变体在致病性细菌铜绿假单胞菌中的细菌生长参数。对 119 种不同生长相关表型的全基因组同时分析揭示了一个全面的表型组，并提供了证据表明，大多数基因型不是表型上孤立的，而是定义了特定的复杂表型基因型簇。由于表型重叠被证明反映了基因型在全球范围内的相关性，因此对生物体表型组的了解可能会极大地促进功能基因组学的发展。
