An ambitious initiative, the Human Genome Project is meant to sequence every single piece of a human’s DNA. Collaborators from research institutions around the world came together to work on it and eventually succeeded in 2003. However, two decades later, an MIT professor, Jonathan Weissman, and his partners have gone beyond the sequence as they present the first map of genes being expressed in human cells.

Weissman and his colleague’s data ties every gene to the job it performs within the cell and was published online just a few days ago in Cell.

“It’s a big resource in the way the human genome is a big resource, in that you can go in and do discovery-based research. Rather than defining ahead of time what biology you're going to be looking at, you have this map of the genotype-phenotype relationships and you can go in and screen the database without having to do any experiments.”

Jonathan Weissman said.

Researchers used the screen to dive into diverse biological questions. Cellular effects of genes with unknown functions, investigating the response of mitochondria to stress, and discovering what genes cause chromosomes to be lost or gained were all using the screen to be investigated.

“I think this dataset is going to enable all sorts of analyses that we haven't even thought up yet by people who come from other parts of biology, and suddenly they just have this available to draw on.”

Tom Norman, former Weissman Lab postdoc and a co-senior author of the paper, said.

Read more on the CRISPR-based map HERE