Otto George Maxwell, Brar Gloria Ann
Department of Molecular and Cell Biology, University of California-Berkeley, Berkeley, CA, 94720, USA.
Curr Genet. 2018 Dec;64(6):1183-1188. doi: 10.1007/s00294-018-0839-3. Epub 2018 Apr 19.
The development of techniques for measuring gene expression globally has greatly expanded our understanding of gene regulatory mechanisms in depth and scale. We can now quantify every intermediate and transition in the canonical pathway of gene expression-from DNA to mRNA to protein-genome-wide. Employing such measurements in parallel can produce rich datasets, but extracting the most information requires careful experimental design and analysis. Here, we argue for the value of genome-wide studies that measure multiple outputs of gene expression over many timepoints during the course of a natural developmental process. We discuss our findings from a highly parallel gene expression dataset of meiotic differentiation, and those of others, to illustrate how leveraging these features can provide new and surprising insight into fundamental mechanisms of gene regulation.
全球范围内测量基因表达技术的发展极大地扩展了我们对基因调控机制在深度和规模上的理解。现在，我们能够在全基因组范围内量化基因表达的经典途径（从DNA到mRNA再到蛋白质）中的每一个中间环节和转变。并行进行这样的测量可以产生丰富的数据集，但要提取最多的信息则需要精心的实验设计和分析。在此，我们论证了在自然发育过程的多个时间点测量基因表达的多个输出的全基因组研究的价值。我们讨论了来自减数分裂分化的高度并行基因表达数据集以及其他数据集的研究结果，以说明如何利用这些特征能够为基因调控的基本机制提供新的、令人惊讶的见解。
