Department of Microbiology and Molecular Genetics, University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey New Jersey Medical School, Newark, NJ 07103, USA.
Genetics. 2013 Jun;194(2):291-9. doi: 10.1534/genetics.113.151258.
One of the top things on a geneticist's wish list has to be a set of mutants for every gene in their particular organism. Such a set was produced for the yeast, Saccharomyces cerevisiae near the end of the 20th century by a consortium of yeast geneticists. However, the functional genomic analysis of one chromosome, its smallest, had already begun more than 25 years earlier as a project that was designed to define most or all of that chromosome's essential genes by temperature-sensitive lethal mutations. When far fewer than expected genes were uncovered, the relatively new field of molecular cloning enabled us and indeed, the entire community of yeast researchers to approach this problem more definitively. These studies ultimately led to cloning, genomic sequencing, and the production and phenotypic analysis of the entire set of knockout mutations for this model organism as well as a better concept of what defines an essential function, a wish fulfilled that enables this model eukaryote to continue at the forefront of research in modern biology.
遗传学家最梦寐以求的事情之一，就是为他们特定生物体中的每个基因找到一套突变体。这种突变体集合是在 20 世纪末由一群酵母遗传学家为酿酒酵母（Saccharomyces cerevisiae）生产的。然而，早在 25 年多前，作为一个旨在通过温度敏感致死突变定义该染色体上大多数或所有必需基因的项目，其最小的一条染色体的功能基因组分析就已经开始了。当发现的基因数量远低于预期时，相对较新的分子克隆领域使我们，实际上是整个酵母研究社区，能够更明确地解决这个问题。这些研究最终导致了对这个模式生物的所有敲除突变的克隆、基因组测序以及表型分析，也更好地定义了什么是必需功能，这一愿望的实现使这个模式真核生物能够继续处于现代生物学研究的前沿。
