News

Dr. Walhout provides perspective in the April 20 issue of Science on the latest Research Article from a longstanding collaboration between Brenda Andrews and Charles Boone at the University of Toronto, and Chad Myers from the University of Minnesota. These groups constructed the first large scale trigenic interaction map of genes that affect colony growth in the yeast S. cerevisiae. The growth of these triple-deletion strains was compared with the growth of the strains harboring single or double deletions in the relevant genes. Given that a total of 36 billion potential trigenic interactions can occur in yeast, this study starts with a set of query strains carrying 302 single gene mutations and 151 double gene mutations. These query strains were tested for genetic interactions versus an array of 1182 strains, each carrying a mutation in an informative gene, so that most general biological processes were included. Thus, in total close to 200,000 trigenic interactions (∼0.0006% of all possible combinations) were tested. Dr. Walhout discusses the implications and future directions from the results of this study.

Perspective

Walhout AJM (2018). If two deletions don’t stop growth, try three. Science, 360(6386), 269–270.

Publication

Kuzmin E, VanderSluis B, Wang W, Tan G, Deshpande R, Chen Y, Usaj M, Balint A, Mattiazzi Usaj M, van Leeuwen J, Koch EN, Pons C, Dagilis AJ, Pryszlak M, Wang JZY, Hanchard J, Riggi M, Xu K, Heydari H, San Luis BJ, Shuteriqi E, Zhu H, Van Dyk N, Sharifpoor S, Costanzo M, Loewith R, Caudy A, Bolnick D, Brown GW, Andrews BJ, Boone C, Myers CL. (2018). Systematic analysis of complex genetic interactions. Science, 360(6386).