17 June 2006

Taking the high throughput plunge

Scientists hesitate before embarking on a genome-wide investigation because some future shift in technology could reduce massively the time and cost of doing large scale work. But without making a start, these technologies won't come into being.

Without a genome-wide, high throughput approach an investigation could remain confined to a search beneath some lamp-lit corner of the genome, when the true key could be languishing elsewhere…

Or as Thomas Jenuwein of the Research Institute of Molecular Pathology, Vienna puts it "One can never be 100% ready... The rest will happen once the momentum is built up" (ref).

Jenuwein is referring to proposals by the International Human Epigenome Project to catalogue epigenetic features including DNA methylation and histone modification, the most well understood mechanisms underlying epigenetic influences on gene activity.

DNA methylation and histone modifications are tissue and developmentally specific. That means that they must be studied in each tissue separately, and at each developmental phase.

And neither process can currently be studied in a high throughput context. Methylation assays are accurate but slow and expensive, while large scale identification of histone marks is prone to problems with accuracy.

As with the Human Genome project, there is no alternative but to take the plunge.

Ref: Jane Qiu, Editor Nature Reviews Neuroscience in Nature May 11th 2006.