- Course overview
- Search within this course
- Taking this course
- What is genomics?
- What is functional genomics?
- Functional genomics case studies
- Common study types in functional genomics
- Designing functional genomics experiments
- Summary
- Quiz: Test your knowledge
- Your feedback
- Learn more
- References
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Summary
What is functional genomics?
Functional genomics is the study of how genes, intergenic regions of the genome, proteins and metabolites work together to produce a particular phenotype. There are several specific functional genomics approaches depending on what you are focused on:
- DNA level (genomics and epigenomics)
- RNA level (transcriptomics)
- Protein level (proteomics)
- Metabolite level (metabolomics)
Integration of data from these approaches is expected to provide a complete model of the biological system under study.
How to design an experiment
When designing an experiment it is important to consider the goals and scale of the experiment, how you will handle and analyse the data and the steps you need to take to ensure the reproducibility of the experiment.
For example:
- How many samples (and replicates) are needed to ensure statistically robust results?
- Which technology is most appropriate to the design and goals of the experiment?
- How will the data be analysed and stored?
- What extra information (metadata) is needed to fully describe the experiment and be compliant with the MIAME (Minimum Information About a Microarray Experiment)/MINSEQE (Minimum Information about a high-throughput nucleotide SEQuencing Experiment) guidelines for reproducibility?
What next?
Why not take our quiz on the next page and test your knowledge from this course? After that, we recommend taking at look at parts II and III of our functional genomics course. These cover: