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| Biotech Updates |
| For the First Time, the Genome of a Plant is Sequenced - December 22, 2000 |
| Researchers from around the world published in mid-December the nearly-complete
sequence of a plant: the cabbage relative called Arabidopsis thaliana.
Arabidopsis is not a crop. But it is a great model plant for probing how plants grow. Like many great model systems, it is small, fast, simple and cheap. It grows to only 6 inches high, it completes its life cycle from seed to shiny seed in 6 weeks (nearly 9 generations a year), it has only 5 chromosome pairs and almost no junk DNA. When compared to corn, it's clearthat corn's a great crop but Arabidopsis is a great model system. Among plant scientists the saying goes, "Arabidopsis is corn is rice."Insights and techniques pioneered and honed with the easy-to-use Arabidopsis will speed the work of finding and understanding genes in corn and rice--and any other plant. The genome consists of 125,000,000 basepairs or "letters" of DNA. It's the equivalent of saying a book has 125,000,000 letters. Our English alphabet has 26 letters; the DNA alphabet has 4 different units or 'bases' that everybody calls by the first letter of their real names (the letters being A, T, G & C).The plant has 25,498 genes that encode proteins. That's like saying there are about 25,000 sentences in the book. (By comparison, the human genome has about 3,000,000,000 basepairs of DNA, and about 80,000 genes.)Now that the Arabidopsis sequence is known and the proteins are identified, the challenge is to figure out what it all means. This next step is called functional genomics: asking "What are the functions of each of the 25,000 genes?"In this stage the Arabidopsis Facility at the University of Wisconsin Biotechnology Center is playing a key role in helping researchers from around the world figure out the functions of all 25,000 genes. More information is available at the links below. The Arabidopsis Information Source http://www.arabidopsis.org/home.html
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| For more information, contact:
Tom Zinnen 425 Henry Mall Madison WI 53706 608-265-2420 zinnen@biotech.wisc.edu |
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