Introduction to Functional Genomics

Photo credit EMBL

Functional genomics is the field of study that focuses on understanding the function of genes and their roles in the overall biology of an organism. Unlike traditional genomics, which is mainly concerned with sequencing and mapping genomes, functional genomics aims to explore how genes and their products (like proteins and RNA) work together to influence an organism’s traits, health, development, and responses to various stimuli.

The key idea is to link genetic information to biological functions.

Within the lab we are developing several methods to support these platforms.

1. Affinity Purification Mass Spectrometry – proteins of interest is tagged so it can be isolated from a complex mixture within cellular protein mixtures, then those isolated proteins are bound to the target of interest and then identified with mass-spectrometry
2. Cas13 – allows for the strategic and specific knockout of RNA molecules