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Transposing BACs to the future

Nature Biotechnology volume 17, pages 332–333 (1999)Cite this article

With the list of fully sequenced genomes growing longer every day, we have clearly entered a golden era of functional genomics. The field can be loosely defined as the comprehensive analysis of how an organism's genotype relates to its phenotype. Tremendous advances in computational biology have begun to derive meaning from the huge volume of raw data coming out of the genome projects, such that an understanding of the structure of a given gene can often be reliably inferred from nucleotide sequence alone. Many of the genes identified through these efforts are entirely novel, however, and the ability to assign a cellular function to the corresponding gene product has proved a much greater challenge. This is partly a result of the technical difficulty in analyzing these genes individually, and large-scale strategies for screening gene function are likely to be embraced by the field. A promising approach is described in this issue by Brune and colleagues1, who have developed a transposon-based system for random mutagenesis of BACmid clones.

Bacterial artificial chromosome-based plasmids (BACmids) and the closely related P1-derived artificial chromosome (PACmid) vectors have become the system of choice for propagating large fragments of genomic DNA in bacteria. Brune and coworkers have previously used this technology to clone the approximately 230 kb genome of the murine cytomegalovirus (mCMV) as a single infectious BACmid recombinant2. As with other herpesviruses, mCMV establishes an intricate relationship with its host upon infection, and a significant number of viral genes encode protein products that either mediate this interaction or are involved in overcoming host defenses. However, the precise function of most of these genes remains to be established.

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Figure 1: Two approaches toward the characterization of cloned genes.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Gene Therapy and Molecular Virology Group at the John P. Robarts Research Institute,

    Craig A. Strathdee

  2. Department of Microbiology and Immunology at the University of Western Ontario, London, Ontario , Canada

    Craig A. Strathdee

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  1. Craig A. Strathdee
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Strathdee, C. Transposing BACs to the future. Nat Biotechnol 17, 332–333 (1999). https://doi.org/10.1038/7884

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