Genome-wide mutant collections: toolboxes for functional genomics

The sequencing of entire genomes has led to the identification of many gene s. A future challenge will be to determine the function of all of the genes of an organism. One of the best ways to ascertain function is to disrupt g enes and determine the phenotype of the resulting organism. Novel large-sca le approaches for generating gene disruptions and analyzing the resulting p henotype are underway in the budding yeast Saccharomyces cerevisiae and oth er organisms including flies, Mycoplasma, worms, plants and mice. These app roaches and mutant collections will be extremely valuable to the scientific community and will dramatically alter the manner in which science is perfo rmed in the future.