GENOME WIDE ANALYSIS OF ARABIDOPSIS GENES USING DNA MICROARRAYS

Michigan State University, East Lansing, MI 48824.

DNA microarray technology is becoming a popular way to study variations in gene expression on a global level allowing the analysis of thousands of genes at any one time. Using the model plant Arabidopsis, we have generated a microarray of 10,000 non redundant ESTs which were selected from the 37,000 randomly sequenced ESTs generated in the Newman lab. These ESTs were made with mRNAs from different tissues harvested at a number of different times during development, and therefore represent a selection of genes expressed throughout the life of the plant. Our initial experiments looked at gene expression patterns of wild type plants grown under different conditions. A number of genes showing a range of differential expression were tested by northern analysis to verify the results. Our project is part of the Arabidopsis Functional Genomics Consortium (AFGC) funded by NSF. Together with Shauna Sommerville at Carnegie Institute and Mike Cherry at Stanford University we will make these Arabidopsis Microarrays available to the academic community. These results will be made available to other researchers on the WWW for data mining and clustering analysis.