Review: Genomic tools and breeding tools to design salinity-smart food crops
Plant Science Research WeeklyMost food crops are relatively intolerant to soil salinity, yet globally soils are becoming increasingly salinized. This excellent review by Raza et al. pulls together the myriad approaches that are being used to develop salinity-smart crops. It starts with an overview of how soil salinity affects crops…
Review: Defining and rewiring of gene regulatory networks for plant improvement
Plant Science Research WeeklyMuch of the focus of functional genomics studies in plants is to improve yield, disease resistance, abiotic stress tolerance and nutritional quality. Many desirable traits are controlled by sets of genes that are coordinated in a complex network, called a gene regulatory network (GRN). A transcription…
JGI Plant Gene Atlas: an updateable transcriptome resource to improve functional gene descriptions across the plant kingdom
Plant Science Research WeeklyFunctional genomic studies across plants are incomplete without deciphering the putative gene functions in model as well as non-model plants. With an aim to facilitate gene function identification and cross-species expression analysis, Sreedasyam et al. describe the Joint Genome Institute (JGI) Plant…