Seq-ing answers: uncovering the unexpected in global gene regulation

The development of techniques for measuring gene expression globally has greatly expanded our understanding of gene regulatory mechanisms in depth and scale. We can now quantify every intermediate and transition in the canonical pathway of gene expression—from DNA to mRNA to protein—genome-wide. Employing such measurements in parallel can produce rich datasets, but extracting the most information requires careful experimental design and analysis. Here, we argue for the value of genome-wide studies that measure multiple outputs of gene expression over many timepoints during the course of a natural developmental process. We discuss our findings from a highly parallel gene expression dataset of meiotic differentiation, and those of others, to illustrate how leveraging these features can provide new and surprising insight into fundamental mechanisms of gene regulation.