Genome-wide phenotypic screens: the totalgreater than the sum of the parts

Connectinggenotypes to phenotypes is critical for uncovering gene functions, mappingbiological networks and understanding the causes of rare and common diseases.Scalable experimental approaches, including gene editing, silencing andknockout, allow to systematically examine how variation at every genomic locusaffects an organism, and open the door to new ideas in integrative modeling.Here, I describe the assembly and analysis of the largest set of systematicgenetic perturbations to date — the Yeast Phenome. This dataset combines~11,000 phenotypic screens of the genome-wide collection of knock-out mutantsin budding yeast Saccharomyces cerevisiae, and integrates the work of 270laboratories and 370 publications. The Yeast Phenome provides the currentlargest, richest and most systematic phenotypic description of an organism, andenables a multitude of enquires into the nature of gene-gene, phenotype-phenotypeand gene-phenotype relationships.