| Abstract: | On the genetics timeline, the first complete sequence of a free-living organism, that of the bacterium Haemophilus influenzae in 1995, was finished 130 years after Gregor Mendel published the results of his famous pea-breeding experiment. Since that sequence, others have followed thick and fast, including those of the nematode Caenorhabditis elegans, the fruitfly, humans and now the dog. But each sequence alone cannot provide researchers with much information about the organism. For that, they have to go through the painstaking process of knocking out genes, one at a time, and observing how these deletions affect biological function. |
