Plant & Animal Genomes XIII Conference

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

Legume Nodulation Gene Discovery

Peter M. Gresshoff¹ , Arief Indrasumunar¹ , Dana Hoffman¹ , Akira Mihayara¹ , Sureeporn Nontachaiyapoom¹ , Qunyi Jiang¹ , Artem E. Men²

¹  ARC Centre of Excellence for Integrative Legume Research, University of Queensland, St Lucia Qld 4072, Australia

²  Australian Genome Research Facility, Brisbane Qld 4000, Australia

Legumes enter a complicated symbiotic relation with Rhizobium bacterium to initiate a nitrogen fixing root nodule. The process is genetically and environmentally regulated. Our group researches the genetic components controlling nodule initiation and the regulation of nodule number (autoregulation). Several genes were cloned and characterised by either positional cloning, sequence homology, EST based screens, and fast neutron deletion mutagenesis. We find an abundance of receptor kinases, phosphatases and transcription factors as well as transporters involved in the symbiosis. Expression profiling by qRT-PCR and use of promoter fusions complement the initial stages of the analysis for interactions of the molecular components.