Lecture 6 Regulatory Variation and the Analysis of Pathways

Quantitative-genetic approaches are often assumed to be restricted to phenotypic characters such as body weight, height, or some measure of shape. However, they apply equally well to molecular traits, such as mRNA and protein abundance. With the recent advent of functional genomics tools (such as microarrays) the power of quantitative genetics is now being widely applied to genomics. Genomics loosely refers to analysis of whole-genome sequence data (essentially a static analysis), while functional genomics is more concerned with the dynamics of how the genome and cell interact. This includes the analysis of the transcriptome (the entire collection of transcripts and their dynamics in the cell), the proteome (the dynamics of the entire collection of proteins), and the metabolome (the dynamics of metabolism in the cell). When studying how a trait evolves, the holy grail is to be able to predict phenotypic change solely from DNA sequence change. Given that we still have only a minor understanding of the full flavor of development, we are a long way from this goal. Our first intermediate step is a better understanding of gene regulation.