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Transposon mutagenesis in rice for the identification of agronomically important genes in cereals

Reference	BBS/E/J/00001117
Principal Investigator / Supervisor	Dr Paul Christou
Co-Investigators / Co-Supervisors
Institution	John Innes Centre
Department	John Innes Centre Department
Funding type	Research
Value (£)	24,859
Status	Completed
Type	Institute Project
Start date	01/08/1997
End date	31/07/2000
Duration	36 months

Abstract

Rice is the staple food of nearly 80% of all human beings. Biotechnological breakthroughs in such an important monocot crop had been lagging behind the dicot crops, but recent developments in transformation systems for rice, together with initiatives in sequencing and mapping the genome of rice, hold great promise for rapid biotechnological and industrial exploitation. The transformation systems developed for rice can now be conveniently used for the introduction of well characterized maize transposons which can give rise to mutant phenotype. These molecular tags help in isolation of the tagged genes. The project aims to develop an efficient system for 'transposon mutagenesis' in rice like the endogenous system in Maize or the heterologous system in Arabidopsis. A saturated population of transposon inserts in rice will be able to provide valuable information about a function for essentially every gene in rice, either in the form of a knockout mutant phenotype, a mis- expression phenotype or a distinct gene expression pattern. Mis-expression and expression pattern gene traps are available in maize, so the development of the proposed systems in rice will provide additional unique features for the identification of cereal genes. Reverse genetics strategy will be used to identify genes by analysing a population saturated for transposon insertions in genes of known functions, by using PCR with a primer from the transposon and the target gene. By this strategy insertions in any of the 15,000 EST's of unknown function can be sought for and the mutant/expression phenotype determined. In addition the generation of knock-out insertion mutations in genes of detrimental agronomic value, can be directly used as a powerful alternative to approaches involving homologous recombination. The transposed elements bearing sequences for site-specific recombination and situated at favourable positions for expression in the rice genome, can also serve as pre-selected donor sites where new genes can be introduced for stable expression.

Summary

unavailable

Committee	Closed Committee - Plant & Microbial Sciences (PMS)
Research Topics	X – not assigned to a current Research Topic
Research Priority	X – Research Priority information not available
Research Initiative	X - not in an Initiative
Funding Scheme	X – not Funded via a specific Funding Scheme

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