Question: How is the gene research you do used for?

Chris Needham answered on 16 Mar 2010:

Well, one example is in plants, whereby plant biologists study particular genes to find out what they do, one way the gene research I do can help this is to come up with network hypotheses that suggest the most likely networks that might exist in the plants based on the data already collected. For example, if a plant has 30,000 genes, and you wanted to test which genes regulate another gene, how would you find out? you could test all 30,000 but many won’t be involved, so a ranked list of proteins with the ones most likely to interact ranked first is really useful to the biologist.
In turn, the biologists wisht find out how plants work, and be able to grow plants that are more resistant to drought and disease.