Scientists have catalogued the first complete genetic blueprint of a plant, a common form of cress. Researchers believe that knowing the plant's genome will teach them how to increase yields and defeat infections in food crops. Researchers from TCD were deeply involved in the overall effort and helped identify parts of the cress genome in earlier work in 1998.
The first full plant genome is published this morning in the science journal, Nature, and was detailed by laboratories in France, Britain, Germany, Japan and the US. The cress, Arabidopsis thaliana, has five chromosomes and the DNA sequence of two of these was published in Nature in 1998. This new work completes the remaining three chromosomes.
The team at Trinity shared in this major international effort. It detailed a "large chunk" of the Arabidopsis genome involving 85,000 DNA steps, according to Dr Tony Kavanagh who completed the work with Dr Nga Lao.
The cress genetic blueprint is tiny compared to that of a human, but detailing each DNA step was still a daunting task.
Its five chromosomes contain 119 million DNA steps, and each of these had to be identified and recorded.
The genome is a powerful information resource for researchers because it includes the sequences of genes, the chemical factories within cells that produce proteins.
