Plant & Animal Genomes XIII Conference

January 15-19, 2005
Town & Country Convention Center
San Diego, CA

AGRIS: A Platform To Establish Cis-Regulatory Networks And To Identify Direct Targets For Transcription Factors In Arabidopsis thaliana

Saranyan K. Palaniswamy1¹ , Ramana V Davuluri¹ , Betsy Read⁴ , Rebecca Lamb² , Erich Grotewold³

¹  Dept. of Mol. Virology, Immunology & Med. Genetics, 570A Medical Research Facility, 420 West 12th Avenue, The Ohio State University, Columbus, OH 43210

²  Dept. of Plant Cellular and Molecular Biology, 500 Aronoff Laboratory, 318 W. 12th Ave.The Ohio State University, Columbus OH 43210

³  Dept. of Plant Cellular and Molecular Biology and Plant Biotechnology Center, 206 Rightmire Hall, 1060 Carmack Rd, The Ohio State University, Columbus OH 43210

⁴  Dept. Biological Sciences, Cal State University, San Marcos, CA 92096

An emerging premise in regulation of gene expression is to identify the regulatory networks in which Transcription Factors (TFs) participate to categorize the temporal and spatial expression of all genes in an organism. This fact underscores that it is vital to establish the architecture of plant promoters to understand gene expression. The identification of direct target genes for selected TFs will act as a platform in establishing genome-wide regulatory networks to explain the expression of all Arabidopsis genes, simultaneously validating an Arabidopsis cis-regulatory element map developed in parallel. AGRIS (Arabidopsis Gene Regulatory Information Server) serves as an information resource for all Arabidopsis promoter sequences, transcription factors and their target genes. It currently houses two databases: AtcisDB (Arabidopsis thaliana cis-regulatory Database) and AtTFDB (Arabidopsis thaliana Transcription Factor Database). AtTFDB contains approximately 1,400 Arabidopsis TF sequences (protein and DNA) grouped into 30-40 families with information on available mutants in corresponding genes. AtcisDB contains an annotation of the promoter sequences for 27,975 Arabidopsis genes. AtcisDB is linked to AtTFDB when binding sites for specific transcription factors have been identified. AGRIS provides tools on Arabidopsis TFs and their experimentally identified binding sites on all genes to initiate the identification of networks in the model dicotyledoneous plant Arabidopsis thaliana. AGRIS can be accessed at http://arabidopsis.med.ohio-state.edu.