Plant & Animal Genomes XI Conference Plant & Animal Genomes XI ConferenceJanuary 11-15, 2003
Town & Country Convention Center
San Diego, CA
Workshop: Arabidopsis
Although the complete sequence of the Arabidopsis genome has been available since December 2000, the scientific community holds experimental proof of function for less than 10% of the annotated genes. To accelerate gene function discovery, the Arabidopsis research community must collectively contribute to the creation of shared genome-scale resources necessary for systematic functional studies of large gene sets. To this end, the European research groups involved in the CATMA consortium have constructed a collection of Arabidopsis Gene Specific Tags (GSTs). With a Specific Primer and Amplicon Design Software (SPADS), the GSTs were selected from gene models built with the Eugène algorithm by automated re-annotation of the complete genome sequence. The first set of GSTs (CATMA v1) comprises a total of 20,000 sequences. Building upon this unique resource, two large-scale European projects have recently been launched: CAGE – Compendium of Arabidopsis Gene Expression and AGRIKOLA - Arabidopsis Genomic RNA Interference Knock-Out Line Analysis. The CAGE project aims to use the CATMA v2 microarray (> 25,000 features) for a systematic, standardized profiling of Arabidopsis samples, taken throughout its life cycle. The resulting Compendium of transcription profiles will be available to the public through the ArrayExpress database at EBI, Hinxton. In addition, two new European initiatives aimed at producing additional Arabidopsis sequence repertoires in a format compatible with a variety of functional assays will also be presented for open reading frames (ORFEUS - Open Reading Frames for European Union Scientists) and promoters (SAP- Systematic Analysis of Promoters).