The long range goal of our lab is to analyze the correlation between structure and function in complex genomes. This includes two major components; 1) the application of high throughput DNA sequencing to analyze DNA of high biological interest and 2) the improvement of the technologies and strategies for automated sequencing to answer various biological problems. In the recent past we focused largely on the sequencing of a region of the 15 million base pair genome of the fission yeast Schizosaccharomyces pombe. The comparison of this sequence to that of the Saccharomyces cerevisiae genome will make a major impact on our understanding of the features of eukaryotic genomes.
Our current focus, in collaboration with the Genome Sequencing Center at Washington University and Applied Biosystems, is the sequencing of a large region (7 - 10 million bases) of the Arabidopsis thaliana genome. Arabidopsis is a small flowering plant that has become the most important model organism for plant molecular biologists. This plant has a genome of about 100 million base pairs. This compact size coupled with the rich molecular biology tools for studying gene function in this organism, has made it the primary target of genome sequencing in plants. This sequence has already yielded a number of new Arabidopsis genes. We are collaborating with CSH scientists Rob Martienssen (Plant Biology) and Tom Marr and Michael Zhang (Computational Biology) to analyze the Arabidopsis sequence being generated. This combined approach to the systematic study of the plant genome will have a major impact on future plant biology research. See also the Lita Annenberg Hazen Genome Center at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory.
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