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Project Summary

Identifying essential functions of conserved hypothetical genes holds the key to understanding the origins of key innovations in the origin of the cell. Our goal is to take a comparative genomic approach to define the molecular machinery that differentiate the Bacterial from its sister lineage that later diverged to became the Archaea and Eukaryotes. One of the obstacles clouding our view of these early cells from a comparative approach is the large number of conserved hypothetical genes present in Archaeal and Eukaryote genomes whose cellular functions are unknown. Our approach is to identify which conserved hypothetical genes are essential to the function of the model crenarchaeon Sulfolobus islandicus. The Crenarchaea are one of the major lineages with in the Archaeal domain with close ties in function to the cellular biology of Eukaryotes. The essential gene profile has not been identified within any organism in this lineage and holds the key to understanding the origin of cellular features in central processing of genomic information through replication, recombination, repair and the shaping of the chromosome.