Who's your neighbor? New computational approaches for functional genomics

Several recently developed computational approaches in comparative genomics go beyond sequence comparison. By analyzing phylogenetic profiles of prote in families, domain fusions, gene adjacency in genomes, and expression patt erns, these methods predict many functional interactions between proteins a nd help deduce specific functions for numerous proteins. Although some of t he resultant predictions may not be highly specific, these developments her ald a new era in genomics in which the benefits of comparative analysis of the rapidly growing collection of complete genomes will become increasingly obvious.