IMPORTANT genes aren’t always the busy ones, say researchers in
California.
Elizabeth Winzeler of Stanford University School of Medicine and her
colleagues measured the activity of more than five hundred genes in the yeast
Saccharomyces cerevisiae as it grew in two different nutrient solutions.
They then measured the effect on the yeast’s growth of crippling each gene in
turn.
To their surprise, the more active genes were generally no more important for
growth than genes whose activity didn’t change with the changing availability of
nutrients (Science, vol 285, p 901). “This says if you just look at
gene activity, a lot of information may get skipped over,” says Winzeler.
