RNAi as a tool to study cell biology: building the genome-phenome bridge

In the few short years since its discovery, RNA interference (RNAi) has revolutionized the functional analysis of genomes: both technical and conceptual approaches to the investigation of gene function are being transformed as a result of this new technology. Genome-scale RNAi analyses have already been performed in the model organisms Caenorhabditis elegans (in vivo) and Drosophila melanogaster (in cell lines), ushering in a new era of RNAi-based approaches to probing the inner workings of the cell. The transformation of complex phenotypic data into mineable 'digitized' formats is fostering the emergence of a new area of bioinformatics related to the phenome.