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United Kingdom
May 2008
A new project (RevGenUK)
is being launched at the John Innes Centre in Norwich to help
geneticists understand how plants grow.
This knowledge can be used to improve the ability of crops to
grow in adverse conditions or to grow more sustainably with
reduced nitrogen fertilisers.
Supported by a grant of £1 million from the Biotechnology and
Biological Sciences Research Council (BBSRC), the project builds
on the JIC’s expertise in TILLING, a technique to detect mutant
genes. Researchers can work out a gene’s function by studying a
defective copy of the gene and seeing how this affects the
plant. This is known as reverse genetics.
To celebrate the launch of RevGenUK, a one-day mini-symposium is
being held at the John Innes Centre on May 15th.
RevGenUK will maintain large populations of mutated plants with
thousands of defective genes. Specialised technology is then
used to find a gene of interest and seeds from the plant
carrying that gene can be ordered by researchers for their own
studies.
RevGenUK will initially include only model plants. Lotus
japonicus and Medicago trunculata are model legumes, used to
study the interactions between plants and symbiotic
microorganisms, especially nitrogen-fixing bacteria. This area
is of great interest because it may lead to reduced requirements
for artificial nitrogen fertilisers. Brassica rapa is a model
brassica and is closely related to Arabidopsis, a cress-like
plant studied in many laboratories around the world. Brassica
rapa is useful for translating knowledge learnt in Arabidopsis
to economically relevant crop species such as oilseed rape.
JIC has been at the forefront of reverse genetics in legumes and
brassicas. The RevGenUK project will bring this expertise
together into a single platform, adapting the techniques for use
in high-throughput sequencing machines, so greatly increasing
the efficiency of the process. The service will be based at the
John Innes Centre Genome Laboratory and can in the future be
extended to include other plant species, to fully exploit the
wealth of data being produced by plant genome sequencing
projects.
The John Innes Centre, Norwich, UK is an independent,
world-leading research centre in plant and microbial sciences
with over 800 staff. JIC carries out high quality fundamental,
strategic and applied research to understand how plants and
microbes work at the molecular, cellular and genetic levels. The
JIC also trains scientists and students, collaborates with many
other research laboratories and communicates its science to
end-users and the general public. The JIC is grant-aided by the
Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council.
http://www.jic.ac.uk
The Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council
(BBSRC) is the UK funding agency for research in the life
sciences. Sponsored by Government, BBSRC annually invests around
£380 million in a wide range of research that makes a
significant contribution to the quality of life for UK citizens
and supports a number of important industrial stakeholders
including the agriculture, food, chemical, healthcare and
pharmaceutical sectors.
http://www.bbsrc.ac.uk |
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