New hope for curing malaria

A new research has developed a fresh computational method to study the function of disease-causing genes with a new discovery of a gene associated with malaria.

Dr. Olivier Lichtarge, professor of molecular and human genetics and director of the Computational and Integrative Biomedical Research Center at Baylor said that today, rapidly falling costs meant that high throughput sequencing projects were revealing the entire gene sequences of ever more species, but the biological functions of most of these genes remain unknown.

The researchers came up with a computational method that allowed biological information to flow from gene to gene across a massive network across many genomes, known as the "supergenomic" network.

Dr. Andreas Martin Lisewski, an instructor in Lichtarge's lab at Baylor, asserted that the network connected millions of genes from hundreds of species based on their interactions within the organism or based on their ancestral relations between different species and normally computing the flow of functional information would be costly and slow, but they developed a compression method that reduced this gigantic network into one that was much smaller and now computationally tractable.

The study is published in the journal Cell.