BIOSCIENCE: yeast genome progress

From: Robert J. Bradbury (bradbury@aeiveos.com)
Date: Sat Oct 26 2002 - 10:46:21 MDT

For those of you who missed it, a team from MIT led by Richard Young
and David Gifford has just effectively "read" the yeast genomic
"program". [This is precisely 6 years after the raw sequence for
the genome was published.]

Lee TI, et al
Transcriptional Regulatory Networks in Saccharomyces cerevisiae.
Science. 2002 Oct 25;298(5594):799-804.

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov:80/entrez/query.fcgi?cmd=Retrieve&db=PubMed&list_uids=12399584&dopt=Abstract

MIT Press release:
http://www.wi.mit.edu/nap/features/nap_feature_young.html

Turns out that 106 out of 141 transcription factors in yeast
seem to regulate ~2300 genes. About an average of 20 genes
being regulated per transcription factor. What is interesting
is that they have developed the technology such that they
have decreased the time for working out what a single transcription
factor regulates from 300 researcher-years to 1 week (a
speedup of more than 15,000x). It allows them to tackle
the human genome which has ~1700 transcription factors.

This nicely complements the work of Cellzone on the yeast proteome
in which they have developed the methods for working out large
numbers of protein-protein interactions.

http://www.embl-heidelberg.de/ExternalInfo/oipa/pr2002/pr070102.pdf

This suggests (to me) that by 2005ish we are going to have a fairly
good understanding of how simple eukaryotic cells actually work.

Robert

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