Our article describing a new, high-quality, high-throughput method for carrying out screens using arrays of micro-organisms is published today in PLoS Genetics. I'm very pleased to be one of three joint first authors of this article!

Quantitative Fitness Analysis Shows That NMD Proteins and Many Other Protein Complexes Suppress or Enhance Distinct Telomere Cap Defects

We present Quantitative Fitness Analysis (QFA), which is a robot-driven technology for capturing high-resolution growth curves on a genome-wide scale, allowing sensitive differentiation between growth phenotypes of arrays of micro-organisms and inference of genetic interaction strengths. In this paper we examine the response of brewers yeast to two distinct telomere disruptions, in combination with independent deletions of all 4300 non-essential genes in the yeast genome. By doing this we greatly increased our understanding of telomere biology, which is particularly relevant to ageing and cancer.

We are very interested to hear from anybody who might like to carry out QFA screens relevant to their own particular area of biological research, and have recently set up a high-throughput screening service at Newcastle University:

http://research.ncl.ac.uk/bioht/