ABSTRACT
Now that we have complete or draft genome sequences for many organisms, attention has moved on to their detailed characterization. Genome sequencing has stimulated massive progress in computational approaches to the detection of genes and other genomic features, although these are still far from perfect. Computational function prediction lags far behind, however, especially for previously uncharacterised genes. This has led to large-scale experimental projects, such as the 1,000 genomes project (1000 Genomes Project Consortium et al. 2010) and ENCODE (Encode Project Consortium et al. 2012), which aim to gather cross-genome polymorphism and molecular function data. At the whole organism level, experimental approaches are developing to relate genomic features to phenotypes with the aim of linking genes to phenotypic traits directly and these are coming to fall under the general rubric of “phenomics”. Although the term phenome fi rst appears in the literature in 1989 (Conrad and Rizki 1989), its use in the sense of the measurable set of all phenotypes of an organism really only emerged in a 1995 publication by Strohman (Strohman 1995) and was given major impetus by the proposal of a human phenome project in 2003 (Freimer and Sabatti 2003). The term has become increasingly common in the literature during the 2000s and 2010s with applications in a widening variety of organisms.
