Skip to main content

Thank you for visiting nature.com. You are using a browser version with limited support for CSS. To obtain the best experience, we recommend you use a more up to date browser (or turn off compatibility mode in Internet Explorer). In the meantime, to ensure continued support, we are displaying the site without styles and JavaScript.

  • News & Views
  • Published:

Functional genomics

Silent genes given voice

Nature volume 409, pages 571–572 (2001)Cite this article

Many genes have little apparent influence on growth rates or metabolic fluxes in an organism. But their roles can be revealed by comparing the effects of mutations on two or more metabolite concentrations.

Most mutations have no noticeable impact on an organism. This implies that changing the activity of some enzyme or other by a substantial factor has little effect; even complete deletion of a gene may not be easily detectable if there are appropriate fail-safe features in the design of the organism. Many genes, up to 85% of those in yeast, do not appear to be required for survival, and a high proportion of these seem to have no detectable effects on metabolic fluxes — the chemical processes that result in energy production or growth. This presents a major barrier to functional studies of a genome. How can we hope to deduce the function of a gene that has no apparent effect? Writing in Nature Biotechnology, Léonie Raamsdonk and colleagues argue that examining metabolite concentrations, which in total are known as the 'metabolome', rather than fluxes, is much more likely to reveal such 'silent' genes (Nature Biotechnol. 19, 45–50; 2001). The authors call their method FANCY, which comes from 'functional analysis by co-responses in yeast' (in this case brewer's yeast, Saccharomyces cerevisiae). It uses the fact, long known but often ignored, that typical effects of changes in enzyme activity on metabolite concentrations are much larger than their effects on metabolic fluxes. The authors looked at two mutations affecting 6-phosphofructo-2-kinase, an enzyme whose product fructose 2,6-bisphosphate acts as a signal to regulate energy production; two mutations in the cytochrome oxidase complex, which catalyses a different energy-related process; and a mutation not related to energy metabolism that was used as a control.

This is a preview of subscription content, access via your institution

Relevant articles

Open Access articles citing this article.

Access options

Buy this article

  • Purchase on Springer Link
  • Instant access to full article PDF
Buy now

Prices may be subject to local taxes which are calculated during checkout

Figure 1: Study of silent genes using co-response angles, from the experiments described by Raamsdonk et al.

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Laboratoire Bioénergétique et Ingénierie des Protéines, Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, 31 chemin Joseph-Aiguier, BP 71, Marseille, 13402 Cedex 20, France

    Athel Cornish-Bowden & María Luz Cárdenas

Authors
  1. Athel Cornish-Bowden
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  2. María Luz Cárdenas
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

Corresponding authors

Correspondence to Athel Cornish-Bowden or María Luz Cárdenas.

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

About this article

Cite this article

Cornish-Bowden, A., Luz Cárdenas, M. Silent genes given voice. Nature 409, 571–572 (2001). https://doi.org/10.1038/35054646

Download citation

  • Issue Date:

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/35054646

This article is cited by

Search

Advanced search

Quick links

Nature Briefing

Sign up for the Nature Briefing newsletter — what matters in science, free to your inbox daily.

Get the most important science stories of the day, free in your inbox. Sign up for Nature Briefing