A grant from the National Science Foundation has provided $4.8 million research funding for UC Riverside enabling researchers Susan R. Wessler, and Jason Stajich to investigate various rice cultivars using genome sequencing and seeing how these cultivars react to drought, disease, and flooding.
The rice plants are mutagenized with Transposable Elements (TE), which identify interesting characteristics within a particular strain and help locate specific elements causing a characteristic within that gene.
With the current severe weather and climate stresses on agriculture as a whole, this research is very timely, rice being one of the main global food staples . Additionally the funding will allow researchers to generate resources in the scientific community, enabling them to follow TE movement and find out how traits are determined by the insertion of a TE in a gene.
UC Riverside researchers will be making extensive use of a Solexa/Illumina HiSeq2000 instrument on several rice cultivars, to measure gene expression for each cultivar. The instrument is part of the UC Riverside Institute for Integrative Genome Biology (IIGB) genomics core, where UC Riverside genomics studies are conducted.
For more detailed information about this research click here
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