Fly Factory

It is a great time to be a biologist. The raw information encoded in the genomes of humans and a host of model organisms is being extracted, but we are still far from understanding what all this raw data means. Browsing a genome and looking at all of the sequences known only by gene prediction ID numbers is both humbling and exciting. Ultimately, the biggest revolution ushered in by ongoing genome projects may well be large-scale biology, not novel techniques. After all, sequencing has been around for decades and creative scientists exploited sequencing for cottage industry gene-by-gene analysis from the beginning. The genomic era is handing us the books of life, but the genomic era is also a story of building the infrastructure and management skills necessary to bring big science to biology. We will need new strategies and more collaborative interactions to systematically explore sequenced genomes.

Simin et al. (2002) generated a collection of expressed sequence tags (ESTs) from Drosophila embryos and then determined the spatial pattern of expression of the corresponding transcripts by in situ hybridization. This effectively points out how a big dataset can help us map functions onto sequenced genomes. The manuscript is a harbinger of the future for the development of a flexible robotic process that can be applied not only to genomic problems, but for a range of techniques that fall under the banner of biology.

Drosophilists are justifiably proud of how much we have learned about patterning during development through the analysis of mutant phenotypes. The classic screens for embryonic lethality showed that genes are required in restricted domains in the embryo …