Abstract

How to link genotypes and phenotypes is a long-standing question in modern biology. Modern high-throughput approaches are key technologies at the forefront of genetic research. They enable the analysis of a biological response to thousands of experimental perturbations and require a tight collaboration between experimental and computational scientists. Perturbation studies and computational approaches have revolutionized research in functional genomics and genetics and promise to lay the foundation for personalized medicine. For modern high-throughput technologies, computation is as important as experimentation. Genome-wide image-based RNA interference (RNAi) screens, for example, are only feasible because of computational techniques. Computational skills to analyse the data have become as important as experimental skills to generate the data.