Functional genomics

The central dogma, first posed by Francis Crick in 1958, tells that DNA encodes for Genes which are translated into Proteins. Over the last 20 years we have charted thousands of genomes, and have a good knowledge on the coding parts of the DNA. But what are these genes/proteins doing? For some organisms, like humans or model organisms, the function of some of the genes/proteins are better known. But this is not true for all genes, and certainly not for less well studied organisms. Over the last years, it even has become clear that genes do not encode for one protein, and that these different isoforms do have different functions. Moreover, we have seen that genes on different alleles are not necessarily active simultaneously, and that this difference occurs at different stages of development. DBL sets out to develop methods to better functionally describe genes. We follow two different approaches, one in which we design automated predictions of functions based on a variety of measurements, the other is a much more detailed analysis of data acquired on specialized activities of genes/proteins.

Topic we address:

• Automated gene function prediction
• Isoform analysis
• Allele specific gene expression