Full Announcement

Manolis Kellis, the Karl Van Tassel Career Development Assistant Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at MIT and also affiliated with the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab, CSAIL, and the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, has announced the culmination of several years of efforts to describe the sequencing and analysis of 12 Drosophila genomes. The work, a large-scale project comprising a diverse interdisciplinary team of scientists co-led by the group at MIT, and also including scientists at the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research and the Harvard Department of Molecular and Cellular Biology, uncovers the functional elements encoded in the fruit fly genome as well as their evolutionary dynamics. The work resulted in many novel findings about the biology of animal genomes, and the computational approaches used promise to help unlock the secrets of many other genomes, including the human.

This work appears in the Nov. 8, 2007 issue of Nature and in more than 40 accompanying papers in Genome Research and other journals.

The group at MIT led the discovery effort, the first of its kind and scale, ranging across protein-coding genes, RNA genes, microRNAs, regulatory motifs, and regulatory networks. By comparing the 12 species, Kellis and his colleagues were able to discover thousands of new genes and other functional elements in the fruit fly, learning a tremendous amount about animal genomes, and revealing new insights into their functioning and regulation. In particular, the analysis showed that some protein-coding genes defy the traditional rules of protein translation, reading through stop codons for sometimes hundreds of amino-acids, and some microRNA genes can produce many functional products from single regions, encoded in overlapping ways.

Kellis reports: "The results have major implications on the understanding of the human genome, and our team at MIT is now leading an effort to discover the functional elements in the human genome by comparing 32 mammals. We are already using similar methods in the human, combined with large-scale experiments to study tissue-specificity, cell differentiation, and epigenomics," Kellis explains. "The methodology of using evolutionary signatures to discover functional elements is general, and should be applicable to any group of closely related species."

For more information see:

• The MIT News Office Nov. 9, 2007 article: Team analyzes genomes of 12 fly species.
• the Nature articles (Vol 450|8 November 2007| doi:10.1038/nature06341):

Discovery of functional elements in 12 Drosophila genomes using evolutionary signatures

Evolution of genes and genomes on the Drosophila phylogeny

• the Technology Review Nov. 8, 2007 article: A Novel Approach to DNA Analysis, Comparing fruit flies reveals a new way to identify the functional elements of genomes.
• The Genome Research Articles:

Revisiting the protein-coding gene catalog of Drosophila melanogaster using twelve fly genomes

Systematic discovery and characterization of fly microRNAs using 12 Drosophila genomes

Evolution, biogenesis, expression, and target predictions of a substantially expanded set of Drosophila microRNAs

Reliable prediction of regulator targets using 12 Drosophila genomes

Accurate gene-tree reconstruction by learning gene- and species-specific substitution rates across multiple complete genomes