An epistasis map (E-MAP) was constructed in the fission yeast, Schizosaccharomyces pombe, by systematically measuring the phenotypes associated with pairs of mutations. This high-density, quantitative genetic interaction map focused on various aspects of chromosome function, including transcription regulation and DNA repair/replication. The E-MAP u...
A recent study in Nature (Isalan et al., 2008) has examined the effects of systematically adding new transcriptional interactions in the bacterium Escherichia coli. Surprisingly, the majority of the engineered connections have no effect on growth, and in some cases the new connections enhance fitness. These findings reveal insights into the robustn...
Analysis of expression quantitative trait loci (eQTLs) is an emerging technique in which individuals are genotyped across a panel of genetic markers and, simultaneously, phenotyped using DNA microarrays. Because of the spacing of markers and linkage disequilibrium, each marker may be near many genes making it difficult to finely map which of these ...