Figure 5: The CHO-K1 genome will aid in cell line engineering, generate hypotheses for biological discovery, and serve as a context to facilitate sequencing efforts and sequence analysis for additional cell lines.

Although significant advances in CHO biology have occurred over the past decades, the accessibility of the CHO-K1 genome will have an impact on at least three major areas. (a) The CHO genome will aid cell line engineering by facilitating the application of experimental and computational sequence-based tools for genetic manipulation and genome analysis. For example, BLAST can be used to identify the CHO sequence of a desired gene, whereas siRNA and site-directed mutagenesis methods can be used to directly modulate gene expression levels and protein activities. Moreover, the genome sequence can be used to reconstruct models of CHO-K1 metabolism, which allow the assessment of how genetic manipulations affect other pathways and can predict nonintuitive genetic changes to improve product yield or quality. (b) The biomolecular mechanisms underlying many phenotypic properties of CHO are poorly characterized (e.g., viral susceptibility). The components underlying these phenotypes can be identified through the comparison of CHO gene content and gene expression with other organisms or cell lines. (c) Although large genomic changes can occur in immortalized and engineered cell lines such as CHO, the CHO-K1 genome can serve as a context for the assembly and analysis of genome sequences from additional CHO cell lines.