High Throughput Processes for Determining Gene Function in Plants and Fungi

Jeff Woessner, Director of DNA Technologies, Paradigm Genetics

Paradigm’s business plan capitalizes on our ability to industrialize scientific methodologies. In the current era of accumulating massive amounts of DNA sequence information, there is increasing pressure to develop approaches to assign function to the multitude of predicted genes. This is a challenging undertaking especially with the added stipulation of high throughput. We are focusing on model systems like Arabidopsis thaliana for plant projects and Magnaporthe grisea for filamentous fungi projects. These model systems offer a small genome size, good genetics and are readily transformable by exogenous DNA. In both model systems the basic strategy involves disrupting endogenous gene expression in a directed fashion and then analyzing the lines containing these altered genes utilizing DNA sequencing, phenomic, gene expression profiling and biochemical profiling platforms. The data from these diverse platforms are collected, linked together, and available for global queries in our proprietary FunctionFinder^TM database.