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eSGA: E. coli synthetic genetic array analysis.

Butland G, Babu M, Díaz-Mejía JJ, Bohdana F, Phanse S, Gold B, Yang W, Li J, Gagarinova AG, Pogoutse O, Mori H, Wanner BL, Lo H, Wasniewski J, Christopolous C, Ali M, Venn P, Safavi-Naini A, Sourour N, Caron S, Choi JY, Laigle L, Nazarians-Armavil A, Deshpande A, Joe S, Datsenko KA, Yamamoto N, Andrews BJ, Boone C, Ding H, Sheikh B, Moreno-Hagelseib G, Greenblatt JF, Emili A.

[1] Banting and Best Department of Medical Research, Terrence Donnelly Centre for Cellular and Biomolecular Research, University of Toronto, 160 College Street, Toronto M5S 3E1, Canada. [2] Life Sciences Division, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, 1 Cyclotron Road, Berkeley, California 94720, USA. [3] Present address: Life Sciences Division, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, 1 Cyclotron Road, Berkeley, California 94720, USA. [4] These authors contributed equally to this work.

Physical and functional interactions define the molecular organization of the cell. Genetic interactions, or epistasis, tend to occur between gene products involved in parallel pathways or interlinked biological processes. High-throughput experimental systems to examine genetic interactions on a genome-wide scale have been devised for Saccharomyces cerevisiae, Schizosaccharomyces pombe, Caenorhabditis elegans and Drosophila melanogaster, but have not been reported previously for prokaryotes. Here we describe the development of a quantitative screening procedure for monitoring bacterial genetic interactions based on conjugation of Escherichia coli deletion or hypomorphic strains to create double mutants on a genome-wide scale. The patterns of synthetic sickness and synthetic lethality (aggravating genetic interactions) we observed for certain double mutant combinations provided information about functional relationships and redundancy between pathways and enabled us to group bacterial gene products into functional modules.

PMID: 18677321 [PubMed - as supplied by publisher]