{"id":"doi:10.1111/1751-7915.12384","kind":"review","title":"Unknown unknowns: essential genes in quest for function","authors":["Danchin A","Fang G"],"author_count":2,"year":2016,"published":"2016-07-20","venue":"Microbial biotechnology","cited_by":58,"doi":"10.1111/1751-7915.12384","arxiv_id":null,"nct_id":null,"source_url":"https://doi.org/10.1111/1751-7915.12384","archive_url":"https://space-kitty.com/papers/doi:10.1111/1751-7915.12384","updated":null,"pmid":"27435445","pmcid":"PMC4993169","openalex_id":null,"pdf_url":"https://europepmc.org/articles/PMC4993169/pdf","abstract":"The experimental design of a minimal synthetic genome revealed the presence of a large number of genes without ascribed function, in part because the abstract laws of life must be implemented within ad hoc material contraptions. Creating a function needs recruitment of some pre-existing structure and this reveals kludges in their set-up and history. Here, we show that looking for functions as an engineer would help in discovery of a significant number of those, proposed together with conceptual handles allowing investigators to pursue this endeavour in other contexts.","abstract_license":"CC-BY (article license as recorded by Europe PMC; abstract reproduced unmodified apart from markup removal)","license":"CC-BY","is_open_access":true,"retracted":false,"peer_reviewed":null,"categories":[],"details":null,"provenance":"europepmc","attribution":"Abstract of \"Unknown unknowns: essential genes in quest for function\" by Danchin A, Fang G, https://doi.org/10.1111/1751-7915.12384, used under its Creative Commons Attribution license (CC-BY); markup removed, otherwise unmodified.","topics":[{"slug":"synthetic-biology","name":"Synthetic Biology & Genome Engineering","domain_slug":"biotech"}],"cited_in_dossiers":[]}