Bioinformatic Tools in Crop Improvement - Crop Improvement: New Approaches and Modern Techniques - page 102

CRES-T
The chimeric repressor silencing technology (CRES-T) system was developed as
a novel method for gene silencing, and a plant specific repression domain that act
as a repressor in transgenic plants; and these can inhibit the expression of target
genes (Hiratsu et al. 2003 ). The CRES-T system has been applied to Arabidopsis in
order to analyse their biological function, and to obtain transgenic plants with agro-
nomically preferable traits. An associated database, FioreDB (Mitsuda and Ohme-
Takagi 2009 ) also provides gene silencing information through chimeric repression
in flowers.
Plant Comparison Genomics and Databases
The accumulation of nucleotide sequences for many of the agricultural crop species
and domestic animals, will allow us to perform genome-wide comparative analy-
ses with the aim of discovering new and important genes involved in phenotypic
expression (Sato and Tabata 2006 ; Itoh et al. 2007 ; Neale and Ingvarsson 2008 ).
The accumulation of genomic resources derived from various species, such as the
extensive collection of cDNAs, ESTs and data from whole-genome sequencing,
should facilitate sharing of information about gene function between model plants
and other less described crop plants. In time this will also accelerate molecular and
cellular systems related to agronomically important traits. A number of information
resources for plant genomics comparisons and data exchange on the web have ap-
peared, along with appropriate analytical tools. Here we highlight integrative data-
bases promoting complete plant comparative genomics that we have not described
previously. The URLs of each integrative database in plant genomics are shown in
Table 2.12 .
PlantPortalInformation
TAIR
TAIR is one of the most popular and integrated information resources in plants,
and although mentioned before it plays important roles as a portal in Arabidopsis
research (Swarbreck et al. 2008 ).
SIGnAL
The Salk Institute Genomic Analysis Laboratory (SIGnAL) is also an information
resource that integrates various data sets of whole plant'omics' results, again mainly
related to Arabidopsis .