A transgenic perspective on plant functional genomics |
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Authors: | Pereira Andy |
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Affiliation: | (1) Plant Research International, P.O. Box 16, 6700 AA Wageningen, The Netherlands |
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Abstract: | Transgenic crops are very much in the news due to the increasing public debate on their acceptance. In the scientific community
though, transgenic plants are proving to be powerful tools to study various aspects of plant sciences. The emerging scientific
revolution sparked by genomics based technologies is producing enormous amounts of DNA sequence information that, together
with plant transformation methodology, is opening up new experimental opportunities for functional genomics analysis. An overview
is provided here on the use of transgenic technology for the functional analysis of plant genes in model plants and a link
made to their utilization in transgenic crops. In transgenic plants, insertional mutagenesis using heterologous maize transposons
or Agrobacterium mediated T-DNA insertions, have been valuable tools for the identification and isolation of genes that display a mutant phenotype.
To discover functions of genes that do not display phenotypes when mutated, insertion sequences have been engineered to monitor
or change the expression pattern of adjacent genes. These gene detector insertions can detect adjacent promoters, enhancers
or gene exons and precisely reflect the expression pattern of the tagged gene. Activation tag insertions can mis-express the
adjacent gene and confer dominant phenotypes that help bridge the phenotype gap. Employment of various forms of gene silencing
technology broadens the scope of recovering knockout phenotypes for genes with redundant function. All these transgenic strategies
describing gene-phenotype relationships can be addressed by high throughput reverse genetics methods that will help provide
functions to the genes discovered by genome sequencing. The gene functions discovered by insertional mutagenesis and silencing
strategies along with expression pattern analysis will provide an integrated functional genomics perspective and offer unique
applications in transgenic crops.
This revised version was published online in August 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date. |
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Keywords: | functional genomics gene detection gene silencing insertion sequences reverse genetics |
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