Functional genomics can be characterized as the intersection of high-throughput sequencing and biological analyses of the genes and/or proteins of complete genomes or gene/protein families. Often it is thought of as completing multiple analyses in a high-throughput or massively parallel fashion with the goal being to find biological meaningful patterns. The biological characterization can take many forms, including generation and examination of protein families, study of gene expression patterns under a defined set of conditions and characterization of interactions of the system under study.
Some functional genomics technology platforms in use at IGS are:
- - Functional protein identification and prediction
- - Identification of protein families based on conserved features across evolutionary distance
- - DNA microarrays and RNAseq for analysis of gene expression profiles
- - Identification of immune responsive epitopes in complete bacterial genomes
The large datasets examined by these analyses provide statistical power to identify previously undiscovered biological patterns.
