Faculty Bibliography Spotlight
Citation: Meneely, Philip (2009). Advanced genetic analysis: genes, genomes, and networks in eukaryotes (New York: Oxford University Press)
Article Summary: I never planned to write a textbook. (I have always wanted to be a mystery writer and I am still waiting to break through in that field.) But I love genetics, and this is an exciting time to be a geneticist. New information on genomes, that is, the complete DNA sequence code for an organism, is becoming available faster than anyone can understand it. This flood of information is redefining how we think about evolution and biology in general, and changing what it means to be a geneticist. For the past 15 years, I have been privileged to teach Biology 301 Advanced Genetic Analysis to some of the brightest and most intellectually engaged students in the world; in this course, I try to show them how this genomic revolution is rooted in what has been learned from classical genetics and molecular biology. No other current textbook attempts to integrate genomics with classical and molecular genetics, so Jonathan Crowe, an editor at Oxford University Press, talked me into writing this one. The cover image, which Jonathan created, captures what I am attempting to do with the book. The spots are the features of a key genomic technique known as a microarray, and the colors represent different patterns of gene expression. A real microarray is a square about an inch on each side that might have 500,000 such features, showing all of the gene expression patterns that occur in a tissue or an organism. We took some of those features and turned them into the shape of the human X chromosome. The combination of microarray features with a chromosome shows what the book and my course hope to accomplish—integrating genomic information with classical and molecular genetics.
Philip Meneely is Professor of Biology at Haverford College.
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