The Molecular Basis of ABA-Mediated Plant Response to Drought - Abiotic Stress: Plant Responses and Applications in Agriculture - page 110

is probably due to the fact that the concentration of neither hormone is important for the fi‐
nal effect but rather the ratio of ABA to ethylene [99; 18].
4. With a little help from arabidopsis - Transferring knowledge from
weeds to crops
A small genome, short life cycle, small stature, prolific seed production, ease of transforma‐
tion, a completely sequenced genome, a near saturation insertion mutant collection, a ge‐
nome array that contains the entire transcriptome - these are the major advantages of using
the model plant Arabidopsis in studies on the molecular basis of responses to environmental
stresses including drought. The identification of stress-related genes, their functions and the
pathways they are involved in, has been facilitated by an increasing number of molecular
tools, genetic resources and the large number of web-based databases available for Arabi‐
dopsis (Table 2).
Genomic resources and results obtained of Arabidopsis provide a resource for exploitation
in crops. Using sequence homology, EST (Expressed Sequence Tag) libraries, and the full-
length cDNA repositories available for crop species, there is a possibility of a simple transfer
of data revealed in Arabidopsis to identify a gene of interest in a crop species (Figure 2).
Figure 2. The pipeline of identification of barley homologous gene based on Arabidopsis and rice information. Gen‐
Bank: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/genbank/; TAIR: www.arabidopsis.org; BLAST: http://blast.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/
Blast.cgi; GeneIndices: http://compbio.dfci.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/tgi/gimain.pl?gudb=barley; GenScan: http://
genes.mit.edu/GENSCAN.html; Splign: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/sutils/splign/splign.cgi; GreenPhyl: http://green‐
phyl.cirad.fr/v2/cgi-bin/index.cgi.