The main product of the Human Genome Project is the knowledge that there are genes circulating among the strings of sequenced adenine, guanine, thymine, and cytosine. This is point A. But researchers want to get to point B, which is knowing how the gene functions.
"We’re at the point where we know the name of the gene and lots of information about it, but we have no context," said Carol Bult, on the research faculty at the University of Maine.
Bult is working on a way to find the context, information that is at the next level of genomic research. Through her work at the National Center for Geographic Information and Analysis, Bult is trying to use the technology of geographical information systems (GIS) to analyze and generate a graphical representation of genes. The marriage of these two fields has resulted in the Genome Spatial Information System Project, or GenoSYS.
GenoSYS is intended to solve a key challenge for biologists working on the Human Genome Project: The capacity to find genes within the human genome is far outstripping the researchers’ ability to learn more about the genes. "You have visualization tools now, but these give you a snapshot of the gene," explained Bult, who previously served as a member of the research faculty at The Institute for Genomic Research.
By taking the spatial representation used by GIS along with database querying capabilities, Bult hopes to create a dynamic map of a gene in its environment that a biologist can query. Just as a user of a GIS program might look at a map of Manhattan and query the database for the nearest cross streets of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, so too could a scientist look at a visual representation of a gene and query a database to find the nearest proteins.
But instead of learning merely about locations, the biologist gleans more about what makes a certain gene behave in a particular way. "We want to know how a gene uses genetic information to be a gene, and there are no tools for this right now," said Bult.
