A Plant Approach to Systems Biology

Large-scale sequencing of complete genomes and the establishment of large compilations of sequence information derived from Expressed Sequence Tags (ESTs) and full-length cDNAs have provided an overwhelming amount of information concerning the physical structure for thousands of specific genes. This initial success in structural genomics has required development of new approaches to efficiently determine the function of the large number of genes for which little or now functional information is available. In the field of plant research, the completion of the genome sequence for the model plant Arabidopsis thaliana (Bevan et al., 2001) triggered a major transition from structural genomics to functional genomics in higher plants. The efficient determination of gene function requires the development of robust functional analysis platforms that allow the reproducible analysis of large numbers of genes in a rapid and high throughput manner.