ABSTRACT
Email: i.gribaudo@ivv.cnr.it 2 Department of Agricultural, Forest and Food Sciences, University of Torino, Via L. da Vinci
44, 10095 Grugliasco-TO, Italy.
Email: chiara.pagliarani@unito.it * Corresponding author: g.gambino@ivv.cnr.it
In the last few years important efforts in structural genomics studies allowed to sequence the genome of several fruit tree species, thus providing powerful tools for detailed molecular studies on crop plants different from traditional model species. Although highly important, the availability of sequencing data is only a starting point for understanding the biology of an organism better. It is indeed necessary to know how thousands of genes can interact with each other to determine the structure of a plant and how the metabolic pathways in which they are involved contribute to plant development and adaptation to the environment. Functional genomics involves the use of several methods for the study of large numbers of genes (ideally the entire set), in order to assign specifi c functions to the genes themselves and determine how they interact. The comparative analysis of gene sequences among species, in order to identify the orthologous ones (genes that have diverged by a speciation event, and that may have conserved a similar function), is a reliable strategy for functional annotation studies (Rouard et al. 2011). However, bioinformatic analyses are not suffi cient to defi ne gene roles completely. Indeed, the function of a gene can be predicted in silico by looking for sequence similarity to previously described genes, but in most cases further experimental confi rmation is needed.
