2012 02 01 Intrexon

Title:
"Protein Metabolism and Gene Expression, a Basic Cellular Quality Control Mechanism linked to Hybrid Vigor".

Abstract:

"Over 100 years ago, hybrid vigor (also known as heterosis) was described in corn, although it was recognized by Charles Darwin in studies of vegetables several decades earlier. Hybrids between genetically diverse varieties display enhanced growth, increased total biomass, increased stress resistance, and higher grain yields. Despite many attempts to understand the biology underlying hybrid vigor, it is still only poorly understood. Gene expression and metabolic studies in corn, rice and other species suggest that protein metabolism plays a role in the growth differences observed between hybrids and their inbred parents. Hybrid vigor is observed in a wide variety of different species suggesting it shares a common underlying biological mechanism. This presentation will describe a model to explain differences in growth and yield between inbreds and hybrids. Data from yeast, mollusks, animal, and human disease research suggests that allele-specific gene expression is linked to protein folding and stability, and helps conserve energy and allows more rapid cell division. The basic cell biology will be explained and the computational approaches will be described to accelerate crop & livestock improvement as well as facilitate the identification of rare disease susceptibility genes in animals and humans."

Reference: Goff, S.A. A unifying theory for general multigenic heterosis: energy efficiency, protein metabolism, and implications for molecular breeding New Phytol 189(4):923-937 (2011)

Title:
“The iPlant Collaborative: Cyberinfrastructure for the plant science community”.

Abstract:

“The iPlant Collaborative (iPlant) is a United States National Science Foundation (NSF) funded project that aims to create an innovative, comprehensive, and foundational cyberinfrastructure in support of plant biology research (PSCIC, 2006). iPlant is developing cyberinfrastructure that uniquely enables scientists throughout the diverse fields that comprise plant biology to address Grand Challenges in new ways, to stimulate and facilitate cross-disciplinary research, to promote biology and computer science research interactions, and to train the next generation of scientists on the use of cyberinfrastructure in research and education. Meeting humanity's projected demands for agricultural and forest products and the expectation that natural ecosystems be managed sustainably will require synergies from the application of information technologies. The iPlant cyberinfrastructure design is based on an unprecedented period of research community input, and leverages developments in high-performance computing, data storage, and cyberinfrastructure for the physical sciences. iPlant is an open-source project with application programming interfaces that allow the community to extend the infrastructure to meet its needs. iPlant is sponsoring community-driven workshops addressing specific scientific questions via analysis tool integration and hypothesis testing. These workshops teach researchers how to add bioinformatics tools and/or datasets into the iPlant cyberinfrastructure enabling plant scientists to perform complex analyses on large datasets without the need to master the command-line or high-performance computational services.”

Reference: Goff, S.A. et al. (2011). The iPlant Collaborative; Cyberinfrastructure for plant biology. Frontiers in Plant Genetics and Genomics. Vol. 2, Article 34.