Plant & Animal Genomes XI Conference Plant & Animal Genomes XI ConferenceJanuary 11-15, 2003
Town & Country Convention Center
San Diego, CA
Session: Plenary Speaker
Arabidopsis has been chosen as a model organism to decipher the biological function of genetic elements carried by plant genomes. At UMRGV, we are contributing to international efforts to develop tools required for the functional analysis of this genome. We are for instance characterizing the PPR genes family as a test case to develop high throughput reverse genetics approches to study large gene families, using FST and RNAi resources. The FST resource exploits the collection of Versailles T-DNA insertion lines and provides access to 30000 tagged lines accessible through the web. To evaluate potential bias in the sequence selectivity of T-DNA insertion, a detailed analysis of insertion sites will be presented. A complementary strategy based on RNAi approches exploiting the set of CATMA gene-specific probes (GST) will also be presented. The AGRIKOLA projects has the goal to generate a set of ten RNAi lines for each gene identified by annotation of the Arabidopsis genome. Arabidopsis is also a resource for the analysis of the organization of crop genomes and positional cloning. The At GST are used as a starting point to study the organization of the rapeseed genome by identification of BAC contigs covering homologous genomic sequences. Finally, the molecular identification of agronomic traits can largely benefit from synteny studies when combined with map-based cloning, as will be illustrated for the molecular identification of Rfo, a Brassica fertility restorer gene. Several of these ongoing projects have been made possible due to Genoplante and EC fundings.