TY - JOUR
T1 - Accelerating Biological Insight for Understudied Genes
AU - Reynolds, Kimberly A.
AU - Rosa-Molinar, Eduardo
AU - Ward, Robert E.
AU - Zhang, Hongbin
AU - Urbanowicz, Breeanna R.
AU - Mark Settles, A.
N1 - Publisher Copyright:
© 2021 Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Society for Integrative and Comparative Biology.
PY - 2021/12/1
Y1 - 2021/12/1
N2 - The rapid expansion of genome sequence data is increasing the discovery of protein-coding genes across all domains of life. Annotating these genes with reliable functional information is necessary to understand evolution, to define the full biochemical space accessed by nature, and to identify target genes for biotechnology improvements. The majority of proteins are annotated based on sequence conservation with no specific biological, biochemical, genetic, or cellular function identified. Recent technical advances throughout the biological sciences enable experimental research on these understudied protein-coding genes in a broader collection of species. However, scientists have incentives and biases to continue focusing on well documented genes within their preferred model organism. This perspective suggests a research model that seeks to break historic silos of research bias by enabling interdisciplinary teams to accelerate biological functional annotation. We propose an initiative to develop coordinated projects of collaborating evolutionary biologists, cell biologists, geneticists, and biochemists that will focus on subsets of target genes in multiple model organisms. Concurrent analysis in multiple organisms takes advantage of evolutionary divergence and selection, which causes individual species to be better suited as experimental models for specific genes. Most importantly, multisystem approaches would encourage transdisciplinary critical thinking and hypothesis testing that is inherently slow in current biological research.
AB - The rapid expansion of genome sequence data is increasing the discovery of protein-coding genes across all domains of life. Annotating these genes with reliable functional information is necessary to understand evolution, to define the full biochemical space accessed by nature, and to identify target genes for biotechnology improvements. The majority of proteins are annotated based on sequence conservation with no specific biological, biochemical, genetic, or cellular function identified. Recent technical advances throughout the biological sciences enable experimental research on these understudied protein-coding genes in a broader collection of species. However, scientists have incentives and biases to continue focusing on well documented genes within their preferred model organism. This perspective suggests a research model that seeks to break historic silos of research bias by enabling interdisciplinary teams to accelerate biological functional annotation. We propose an initiative to develop coordinated projects of collaborating evolutionary biologists, cell biologists, geneticists, and biochemists that will focus on subsets of target genes in multiple model organisms. Concurrent analysis in multiple organisms takes advantage of evolutionary divergence and selection, which causes individual species to be better suited as experimental models for specific genes. Most importantly, multisystem approaches would encourage transdisciplinary critical thinking and hypothesis testing that is inherently slow in current biological research.
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U2 - 10.1093/icb/icab029
DO - 10.1093/icb/icab029
M3 - Article
C2 - 33970251
AN - SCOPUS:85124435617
SN - 1540-7063
VL - 61
SP - 2233
EP - 2243
JO - Integrative and Comparative Biology
JF - Integrative and Comparative Biology
IS - 6
ER -