Advantages, disadvantages and research progress on strategies for screening and identifying functional genes

Abstract

The screening and identification of functional genes is a key step to deeply understand various biological phenotypes. Forward genetics including traditional genetics, genome-wide association analysis, the comparison of gene expression profiles and bioinformatics, and reverse genetics including cDNA library, RNA interference, CRISPR-Cas9 technology, insertion mutation as well as model organisms have been applied to screening functional genes. Different methods have their own advantages and disadvantages and technology combination to screen and to identify functional genes is a good choice of strategy.

Keywords

• functional genes|forward genetics|reverse genetics|bioinformatics|model organism