<p>This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.</p> <p>In the year 2001 a collection of yeast strains will be completed that are deleted in the 6000
open reading frames selected as putative genes by the initial bioinformatic analysis of the
<italic>Saccharomyces cerevisiae</italic> genome. The collection was produced by the transatlantic yeast
gene deletion project, a collaboration involving researchers in the USA, Canada and
Europe. The European effort was part of EUROFAN (European Functional Analysis
Network) where some of the strains could feed into various functional analysis nodes
dealing with specific areas of cell biology. With approximately 40% of human genes
involved in heritable disease having a homologue in yeast and with the use of yeast in
various drug discovery strategies, not least due to the dramatic increase in fungal
infections, these strains will be valuable in trans-genomic studies and in specialised interest
studies in individual laboratories. A detailed analysis of the project by the consortium is in
preparation, here we discuss the yeast strains, reported findings and approaches to using
this resource.</p>
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Comp Funct Genomics. 2001 Aug; 2(4):236-242