Breaking the Bottleneck of Genomes: Understanding Gene Function Across Taxa Workshop Report
- Michigan State Univ., East Lansing, MI (United States)
- Lawrence Berkeley National Lab. (LBNL), Berkeley, CA (United States)
- Dept. of Energy (DOE), Washington DC (United States). Office of Science. Office of Biological and Environmental Research. Biological Systems Science Division
In the last few decades, high-throughput technologies using various “omics” have enabled unprecedented views of biological systems at the molecular level. In parallel, the integration of omic datasets using computational modeling has provided new understanding of biological processes in organisms relevant to the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) missions in energy and the environment. Collectively, these developments have spearheaded the advancement of systems biology, which can be viewed as a holistic approach for deciphering the complexity of biological systems. However, as high-throughput omic technologies and integrative systems biology efforts have improved our understanding of some biological systems, analyzing and finding meaningful answers within these massive datasets remain extremely challenging, in large part due to the lack of fundamental knowledge of gene function. Indeed, all sequenced genomes, both microbes and plants, contain large numbers of genes of “unknown function” that significantly limit scientists’ ability to model, predict, and engineer organisms with enhanced functions relevant to DOE. Current methodologies can be employed to decipher gene function, but they are typically slow, laborious, inefficient, and not scalable. This “bottleneck” in genome understanding could be broken with new, innovative, and transformative experimental tools, datasets, and computation that can define gene function on a massive and high-throughput scale compatible with the pace of DNA sequencing. In light of this grand challenge, DOE’s Office of Biological and Environmental Research (BER) convened the Breaking the Bottleneck of Genomes: Understanding Gene Function Across Taxa workshop on November 1–2, 2018. This workshop brought together leaders in microbiology, plant sciences, technology, and computation, who collectively identified the experimental and data analysis gaps preventing large-scale gene function determination as well as opportunities for overcoming these gaps.
- Research Organization:
- USDOE Office of Science (SC) (United States)
- Sponsoring Organization:
- USDOE Office of Science (SC), Biological and Environmental Research (BER)
- OSTI ID:
- 1616527
- Report Number(s):
- DOE/SC-0199
- Country of Publication:
- United States
- Language:
- English
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