Genomics:

We are living in an unprecedented age of biological discovery and the application of biological knowledge. Programmed DNA sequencing delivered, in the year of 2001 over the 2.6 billion base pairs of DNA sequence in the human genome the Human Genome Project and the genomes of various other organisms have either previously been or are being sequenced too. This vast and ever-raising, wealth of DNA sequence data is a major asset for genomics, the learning of an organism's genome. One of the major key target is to understand the functions of the huge numbers of new genes predicted through genome sequencing and a field known as functional genomics. Single approach to revealing the function of a gene is known as reverse genetics whereby a mutation can be established in a cloned gene and the modified gene can be introduced into a host cell to monitor the effects of the mutation. The approach is known as reverse genetics because beginning with a gene and then building a mutant is the reverse of traditional genetics whereby mutants were used to identify genes. An additional useful approach is RNA interference (RNAi) whereby a double-stranded RNA (dsRNA) corresponding to the sense and antisense strands of the gene under investigation is install into cells. The dsRNA is degraded in vivo but the resulting fragments base pair with mRNA from the goal gene and cause in which to be degraded also in the effect terminating expression of the gene. By monitoring the cellular effects of this loss of function gives evidence of the role of the gene in vivo.