SCIENCE

The most detailed annotation yet of the fruit-fly genome points the way to understanding the genomes of all organisms

In the past decade researchers have made astonishing progress in the rapid and accurate sequencing of genomes from all realms of life. Yet the listing of chemical base pairs has gotten far ahead of understanding how the information they contain becomes functional. Even the best-understood genomes conceal mysteries.

Genetic information carried by DNA and RNA operates together with the patterns and physical organization of chromosomes to produce a working organism. Major advances in understanding these complex relationships are published this week by the “model organism Encyclopedia of DNA Elements” (modENCODE) project, funded by the National Institutes of Health’s National Human Genome Research Institute. These new insights into reading the genome apply not only to the fruit fly Drosophila melanogaster and the roundworm Caenorhabditis elegans, modENCODE’s two model organisms, but will apply to human beings and many other organisms as well.

Susan Celniker and Gary Karpen of the Life Sciences Division at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory lead two of the principal research groups in the Drosophila modENCODE Consortium. They are among the senior co-authors of the Consortium’s report on integrating Drosophila functional elements and regulatory circuits, led by Manolis Kellis of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, which appears in the December 24 issue of Science now online. Separate papers by the Celniker and Karpen-led groups will appear in Nature in January and are now available online, and more papers by their groups will soon appear in an issue of Genome Research devoted to modENCODE studies.