Plant & Animal Genomes XIII Conference Plant & Animal Genomes XIII ConferenceJanuary 15-19, 2005
Town & Country Convention Center
San Diego, CA
For the last twenty years there have been continual claims that arabidopsis and other plant model species will make crop plant improvement much more efficient. The thesis is that so many more experiments can be done more quickly, cheaply and in much more detail with arabidopsis that many more hypotheses can be critically tested. The resulting relevant information can then be transferred to plant breeding programs to give rise to better products more quickly and less expensively. This lecture will review this thesis.
There are three general ways that arabidopsis research can help crop plant improvement. Firstly, the systems biology of complex traits can be studied with the resources of a full genome sequence, knockout mutations in every gene, facile gene cloning and transformation to find the genes and networks that are the major determinants of specific traits. However, the extent to which the alleles, developmental, biochemical and physiological systems are equivalent across species is very variable. Also it is difficult to predict which crop genes are true orthologs of arabidopsis genes, especially when promoter functions are considered in addition to the coding sequences. Secondly, it is possible to use arabidopsis as a rapid screening host to find transgenes that make major improvements in traits that are important in crop plants. Thirdly, the model plant is where new methods and frontier knowledge are usually discovered that open up new hypotheses for crop biology. An example of this is the large catalogs of microRNAs and smallRNAs that have been found recently in plant cells, many of which are indicators of new systems for controlling gene expression.
These uses of model species for crop breeding will be reviewed with examples