Plant Tissue Cult. 14(2) : 173-187, 2004 (December)

Review paper

The Arabidopsis Information Resource : Impact for Identification of Important Genes in Less Known Plant Species

Greg Clark, Kanagasabapathi Sathasivan and Ahmad S. Islam

Department of Molecular, Cell and Developmental Biology, University of Texas at Austin, Texas, 78712 USA

Key words:

Abastract

This is the second article in the series on, ?Valuable Internet Resources for Plant Molecular Biology Research? (Clark et al. 2003). In the last paper we mainly concentrated on the use of ?The Arabidopsis Information Resource (TAIR)? for obtaining basic information about genes of interest, their location, structure and functions. Besides being a powerful research tool to Arabidopsis researchers, the goal of the TAIR website was to provide an easy-to-access database to the entire community of research scientists in biology helping them to solve research problems in their plants of interest including economically important plant species. We have shown in the current paper that the above objective, which prompted the launching of this website in 2000, has been realized admirably to the benefit of the entire biological research community. Giving examples, we have shown here how using the abundance of information available in this Super Resource Center, it is possible to retrieve all relevant information about important genes such as 4CL1 and LOS1 and apply this knowledge in determining homologous regions controlling the same traits in the two jute species which yield fibers of commerce.

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