Digital genome

Revolutionary progress in understanding plant biology is being driven through advances in DNA sequencing technology. Carnegie plant scientists have played a key role in the sequencing and genome annotation efforts of the model plant Arabidopsis thaliana and the soil alga Chlamydomonas reinhardtii. Now that many genomes from algae to mosses and trees are publicly available, this information can be mined using bioinformatics to build models to understand gene function and ultimately for designing plants for a wide spectrum of applications.

 Carnegie researchers have pioneered a genome-wide gene association network Aranet that can assign functions to genes for which no function had previously been assigned (to date about 50% of the plant genome) by their associations with genes of known function. They are also building protein interaction and metabolic pathway networks in plants to systematically identify signaling and metabolic pathways and relationships among these pathways.

Investigators also develop and apply mining methods to capture biological knowledge about the function of plant genes and maintain and improve the Arabidopsis genome annotation and provide online bioinformatics tools for use by plant biologists worldwide.Other researchers use algal genomes to identify genes that are specific to the green lineage, the so-called Greencut, to uncover the yet unknown regulatory systems critical for photosynthesis.

The objective of this computational work is to understand the evolution of multicellularity and sexual reproduction in the plant lineage, and the evolution of plant- specific characters, and the interactions between plants and other organisms.