- Functional genomics
Functional genomics is a field of
molecular biology that attempts to make use of the vast wealth of data produced by genomic projects (such as genome sequencing projects) to describegene (andprotein ) functions and interactions. Unlikegenomics andproteomics , functional genomics focuses on the dynamic aspects such as gene transcription, translation, andprotein-protein interaction s, as opposed to the static aspects of the genomic information such asDNA sequence or structures.Fields of application
Functional genomics includes function-related aspects of the genome itself such as
mutation and polymorphism (such as SNP) analysis, as well as measurement of molecular activities. The latter comprise a number of "-omics" such astranscriptomics (gene expression ),proteomics (protein expression ),phosphoproteomics (a subset of proteomics) andmetabolomics . Together these measurement modalities endeavor to quantitate the various biological processes and improve our understanding of gene and protein functions and interactions.Frequently used techniques
Functional genomics uses mostly high-throughput techniques to characterize the abundance gene products such as mRNAs and
protein s. Some typical technology platforms are:
*DNA microarray s and SAGE for mRNA
*two-dimensional gel electrophoresis andmass spectrometry for proteinBecause of the large quantity of data produced by these techniques and the desire to find biologically meaningful patterns,
bioinformatics is crucial to this type of analysis. Examples of techniques in this class aredata clustering orprincipal component analysis for unsupervisedmachine learning (class detection) as well asartificial neural network s orsupport vector machine s for supervised machine learning (class prediction, classification).ee also
*
Systems biology
*Structural genomics
*Comparative genomics
*Pharmacogenomics External links
* [http://www.functionalgenomics.org.uk European Science Foundation Programme on Frontiers of Functional Genomics]
* [http://www.mugen-noe.org/ MUGEN NoE] — Integrated Functional Genomics in Mutant Mouse Models
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