Purdue-USDA researchers create new web-based regulatory gene discovery tool for plants

In Indiana, researchers interested in improving a given trait in plants can now identify the genes that regulate the trait’s expression without doing any experiments. Purdue researchers and 10 co-authors published the details of the new web-based regulatory gene discovery tool in the April 23 issue of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. A patent is pending on the results that relates to economically important seed oil biosynthesis.

The Purdue-USDA team sought to build a resource that learns, from large amounts of publicly available data, to quickly identify what special genes called transcription factors regulate the expression of a given trait in various plant species.