The fully sequenced genomes of Arabidopsis, rice, tomato, potato, maize, wheat, and soybean offer large amounts of information
about cellular and developmental biology. It is a central challenge of genomics to use this information in discovering the
function of proteins and identifying developmentally important genes. Although classical genetic approaches to gene identification
which rely on disruption of a gene leading to a recognizable phenotype continues to be an extremely successful one, T-DNA
mediated gene trap tagging which has been developed that utilize random integration of reporter gene constructs has also proven
to be an extremely powerful tool in plant cellular developmental biology. In this review, how gene trap tagging, promoter
trap tagging, and enhancer trap tagging detection systems have been applied to plant biology is described and these gene identification
techniques could be useful to the plant molecular biology and plant biotechnology community.
Key words Genomics - Gene identification - Enhancer trap - Promoter trap - Gene trap
CLC number Q78 - S718.4
Document code A
Biography: TANG Wei (1964-), Research associate, Forest Biotechnolo Group, Department of Forestry, North Carolina State University,
Raleigh, NC 27695-7247, USA.
Responsible editor: Chai Ruihai