Exploration of diverse bacteria signals big advance for gene function prediction

In the air, beneath the ocean's surface, and on land, microbes are the minute but mighty forces regulating much of the planet's biogeochemical cycles. To better understand their roles, scientists work to identify these microbes and to determine their individual contributions. While advances in sequencing technologies have enabled researchers to access the genomes of thousands of microbes and make them publicly available, no similar shift has occurred with the task of assigning functions to the genes uncovered.To help overcome this bottleneck, scientists at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab), including researchers at the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) Joint Genome Institute (JGI), have developed a workflow that enables large-scale, genome-wide assays of gene importance across many conditions. The study, "Mutant Phenotypes for Thousands of Bacterial Genes of Unknown Function," has been published in the journal Nature and is by far the largest functional genomics study of bacteria ever published.