A Rapid FACS-Based Strategy to Isolate Human Gene Knockin and Knockout Clones

Gene targeting protocols for mammalian cells remain inefficient and labor intensive. Here we describe FASTarget, a rapid, fluorescent cell sorting based strategy to isolate rare gene targeting events in human somatic cells. A fluorescent protein is used as a means for direct selection of targeted clones obviating the need for selection and outgrowth of drug resistant clones. Importantly, the use of a promoter-less, ATG-less construct greatly facilitates the recovery of correctly targeted cells. Using this method we report successful gene targeting in up to 94% of recovered human somatic cell clones. We create functional EYFP-tagged knockin clones in both transformed and non-transformed human somatic cell lines providing a valuable tool for mammalian cell biology. We further demonstrate the use of this technology to create gene knockouts. Using this generally applicable strategy we can recover gene targeted clones within approximately one month from DNA construct delivery to obtaining targeted monoclonal cell lines

BAC TransgeneOmics: a high-throughput method for exploration of protein function in mammals (vol 5, pg 409, 2008)

The interpretation of genome sequences requires reliable and standardized methods to assess protein function at high throughput. Here we describe a fast and reliable pipeline to study protein function in mammalian cells based on protein tagging in bacterial artificial chromosomes (BACs). The large size of the BAC transgenes ensures the presence of most, if not all, regulatory elements and results in expression that closely matches that of the endogenous gene. We show that BAC transgenes can be rapidly and reliably generated using 96-well-format recombineering. After stable transfection of these transgenes into human tissue culture cells or mouse embryonic stem cells, the localization, protein-protein and/or protein-DNA interactions of the tagged protein are studied using generic, tag-based assays. The same high-throughput approach will be generally applicable to other model systems

Le Village suisse comme modèle d'urbanisme

This chapter introduces systems biology, its context, aims, concepts and strategies. It then describes approaches and methods used for collection of high-dimensional structural and functional genomics data, including epigenomics, transcriptomics, proteomics, metabolomics and lipidomics, and how recent technological advances in these fields have moved the bottleneck from data production to data analysis and bioinformatics. Finally, the most advanced mathematical and computational methods used for clustering, feature selection, prediction analysis, text mining and pathway analysis in functional genomics and systems biology are reviewed and discussed in the context of use cases