Enabling a community to dissect an organism: overview of the Neurospora functional genomics project.
A consortium of investigators is engaged in a functional genomics project centered on the filamentous fungus Neurospora, with an eye to opening up the functional genomic analysis of all the filamentous fungi. The overall goal of the four interdependent projects in this effort is to accomplish functional genomics, annotation, and expression analyses of Neurospora crassa, a filamentous fungus that is an established model for the assemblage of over 250,000 species of non yeast fungi. Building from the completely sequenced 43-Mb Neurospora genome, Project 1 is pursuing the systematic disruption of genes through targeted gene replacements, phenotypic analysis of mutant strains, and their distribution to the scientific community at large. Project 2, through a primary focus in Annotation and Bioinformatics, has developed a platform for electronically capturing community feedback and data about the existing annotation, while building and maintaining a database to capture and display information about phenotypes. Oligonucleotide-based microarrays created in Project 3 are being used to collect baseline expression data for the nearly 11,000 distinguishable transcripts in Neurospora under various conditions of growth and development, and eventually to begin to analyze the global effects of loss of novel genes in strains created by Project 1. cDNA libraries generated in Project 4 document the overall complexity of expressed sequences in Neurospora, including alternative splicing alternative promoters and antisense transcripts. In addition, these studies have driven the assembly of an SNP map presently populated by nearly 300 markers that will greatly accelerate the positional cloning of genes.
Dunlap
Jay C
JC
Department of Genetics, Dartmouth Medical School, Hanover, New Hampshire 03755, USA.
Borkovich
Katherine A
KA
Henn
Matthew R
MR
Turner
Gloria E
GE
Sachs
Matthew S
MS
Glass
N Louise
NL
McCluskey
Kevin
K
Plamann
Michael
M
Galagan
James E
JE
Birren
Bruce W
BW
Weiss
Richard L
RL
Townsend
Jeffrey P
JP
Loros
Jennifer J
JJ
Nelson
Mary Anne
MA
Lambreghts
Randy
R
Colot
Hildur V
HV
Park
Gyungsoon
G
Collopy
Patrick
P
Ringelberg
Carol
C
Crew
Christopher
C
Litvinkova
Liubov
L
DeCaprio
Dave
D
Hood
Heather M
HM
Curilla
Susan
S
Shi
Mi
M
Crawford
Matthew
M
Koerhsen
Michael
M
Montgomery
Phil
P
Larson
Lisa
L
Pearson
Matthew
M
Kasuga
Takao
T
Tian
Chaoguang
C
Baştürkmen
Meray
M
Altamirano
Lorena
L
Xu
Junhuan
J
D001483:Base Sequence; D002874:Chromosome Mapping; D004271:DNA, Fungal / Q000235:genetics; D017353:Gene Deletion; D020869:Gene Expression Profiling; D015723:Gene Library; D005821:Genetic Techniques; D016681:Genome, Fungal; D023281:Genomics; D009154:Mutation; D009491:Neurospora / Q000235:genetics*; D020411:Oligonucleotide Array Sequence Analysis; D010641:Phenotype; D020641:Polymorphism, Single Nucleotide
D004271:DNA, Fungal