The Responsibility to Share: Sharing the Responsibility
- Martin Yuille1,8,
- Bernhard Korn2,
- Troy Moore3,
- Andrew A. Farmer4,
- John Carrino5,
- Christa Prange6, and
- Yoshihide Hayashizaki7
- 1 Medical Research Council geneservice, Genome Campus, Hinxton, Cambridge CB10 1SB United Kingdom
- 2 Deutsches Ressourcenzentrum fuer Genomforschung, Im Neuenheimer Feld 506, Heidelberg D-69120 Germany
- 3 Open Biosystems Inc., Huntsville, Alabama 35806, USA
- 4 BD Biosciences Clontech, Palo Alto, California 94303, USA
- 5 Invitrogen Corporation, Carlsbad, California 92008, USA
- 6 The I.M.A.G.E. Consortium, Biology and Biotechnology Research Program, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, Livermore, California 94550, USA
- 7 RIKEN Yokohama Institute, Yokohama, Kanagawa 230-0045 Japan
This extract was created in the absence of an abstract.
A New Breed of Clones
The transcriptome, promoterome, and phenome clone sets described in this special issue of Genome Research are among the first of a new breed of clones. Their novel features affect how distributors on the path from originator to end user handle such resources. These new features are individual design, collective use, large scale, and flexibility. Whereas pre-genome clones bore random lengths of genomic DNA or cDNA from random locations in the genome or transcriptome, each of these post-genome clones bears a specialized vector harboring a tailored sequence that the originator selected and/or designed down to the last base pair.
These clone sets are intended for collective use in two senses. Firstly, an entire set may be used in one experiment with the aim of identifying the subset that elicits some detectable phenotype in vivo. Secondly, an entire community of scientists (e.g., the worm community) may use the same clone set to identify further subsets of clones that each elicit other phenotypes. When they share their data, its combined scientific value increases disproportionately.
The scale of these experiments is orders of magnitude greater than those studying one clone at a time. Since the 1970s, constructs have been arduously created by restriction and ligation. This technology is now being displaced by less-arduous in vitro recombination-based methods that permit systematic approaches to the study of defined sequences. Recombination-based cloning makes it far easier to derive subclones and swap specific sequences (representing, for example, orthologous protein domains or epitope tags). This flexibility means that initial clone sets will become the basis for many rounds of subcloning to permit finer experimental definition of function. The simplicity of these methods and the growth of bioinformatics and robotics facilitate production of large-scale clone sets whose experimental value increases geometrically, but only if distribution is timely, accurate, and efficient. …
