Resumen
- In the framework of its work plan for functional analysis of cereal genomes, the Genoplante consortium decided to construct a rice T-DNA insertional mutagenesis collection. Rice was chosen because of its small genome and because of all the genomic resources available for this species (ESTs, genetic maps, complete sequence, etc.). The lines were produced in CIRAD laboratories, and grown in CIRAD and IRD greenhouses, in Montpellier, France. The present work carried out at CIAT as a collaboration with Genoplante consists in: (i) a systematical phenotypic evaluation of the mutant collection, with production of an associated phenotypic database, and (ii) the multiplication of seeds for the entire collection, for later distribution to all laboratories interested in rice functional genomics. What is a T-DNA Mutant Collection? A T-DNA mutant collection is a library of lines obtained from transformation by Agrobacterium tumefaciens, using a specific construct called the T-DNA insert. If the TDNA is inserted in a gene or its regulatory region, the insertion event results in alteration or disruption of the functionality of this gene, which can even be completely silenced. Each line contains one or several insertions, resulting in the silencing of one of several genes in the line. Typically, several thousand mutant lines are produced. As the transformation events can be considered to be uniformly dispersed along the genome, one may expect that an important fraction of the genes contain an insertion. Additionally, the insertion sites can be individually characterized in sequencing the genomic region flanking the T-DNA insertion site. We then make a Flanking Sequence Tags (FST) database. Hence, in the case of completely sequenced genomes like Arabidopsis or rice, the insertion(s) of each line can be placed on the annotated genome through sequence comparison and thus related to a specific gene or gene region.