ABSTRACT

The goal of this chapter is to introduce several methodologies that have been developed to characterize gene function in crop plants. Increasingly, technologies are exploiting the ease by which genomic DNA sequence can be obtained. This is providing new opportunities to understand genetic and biochemical networks in species that have traditionally been refractory to genetic analysis. Techniques such as association mapping and quantitative trait loci (QTL) analysis (Yu and Buckler 2006) and map-based cloning (Bortiri et al. 2006) are becoming much more attractive due to this increase in sequence data. In addition, techniques such as targeting induced local lesions in genomes (TILLING; Greene et al. 2003; Till et al. 2007) are now being modified to incorporate high-throughput sequencing to reduce the time, labor and cost associated with screens of mutant collections. Sophisticated insertional

Cornell University, Ithaca NY, USA 2Department of Biology, Queen’s University,

Kingston, Ontario, K7L 3N6, Canada

*Corresponding author: tpb8@cornell.edu

vectors have also been developed for crop plants, providing new opportunities to introduce transgenes and to perform genetic analysis. The focus of this chapter is on describing some of the emerging technologies that are aiding gene discovery and characterization in a few selected species that represent major world food, forestry and bioenergy crops while understanding that the same or similar technologies could be broadly applied to additional crops. In particular, transposon tagging, activation tagging, expression traps and TILLING resources that are in development will be discussed. We will also compare some of the advantages and disadvantages of these technologies and how they may be applied to developing models for bioenergy crops.