DEPAMPHILIS, CLAUDE1*, VICTOR ALBERT2, JOHN E. CARLSON1, JEFF J. DOYLE3, DAWN FIELD4, MICHAEL FROHLICH5, HONG MA1, WEBB MILLER1, DAVID OPPENHEIMER6, DOUGLAS SOLTIS7, PAMELA SOLTIS8, STEVEN TANKSLEY9, and GUENTER THEISSEN10. 1Department of Biology or Forestry and Institute of Molecular Evolutionary Genetics, Penn State University, University Park, PA 16801; 2The Natural History Museums and Botanical Garden, University of Oslo, Oslo, Norway; 3L.H. Bailey Hortorium, Department of Plant Biology, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY 14853; 4C.E.H., Oxford, UK OX11; 5British Museum of Natural History, London, UK; 6Department of Biology, University of Alabama, Tuscaloosa, AL; 7Dept of Botany and the Genetics Institute, University of Florida, Gainesville, FL 32611; 8Florida Museum of Natural History and the Genetics Institute, University of Florida, Gainesville, FL 32611; 9Department of Plant Breeding, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY 14853; 10Max Planck Institute for Breeding Research, D-50829 Köln, Germany. - The Floral Genome Project:.
Variations in floral development are of major evolutionary and
economic importance, impacting features such as pollination, fruit
development, and seed dispersal. However, despite the central role of
flowers in plant reproduction and agriculture, the processes
responsible for the origin and evolution of the flower remain central
problems in plant biology. Major questions include: how did perianth
organs (sepals and petals) and carpels originate? How did flowers
become bisexual? What causes variation in sepal, petal, stamen, and
carpel structure? What regulatory pathways control floral development
throughout the angiosperms, and how do they compare with those of
model plants? The newly established Floral Genome Project (FGP) is a
multi-university project that will address these and other questions
about the origin and diversification of flowers and the floral
developmental program? The project will involve large-scale EST and
cDNA squencing of 15 plant species, followed by microarray and in situ
expression studies, and extensive bioinformatic and molecular
evolutionary analysis. Many new resources will be generated for the
botanical community, including clones and sequences of a large number
of plant nuclear genes in diverse basal angiosperms, monocots,
eudicots, and gymnosperms. This talk will introduce the goals and
methods of the FGP, and provide a progress report on the initial steps
of taxon selection, tissue collection and RNA isolation, library
building, and EST sequencing.
Key words: Acorus, Amborella, Escholtzia, Flower development, Nuphar, Welwitschia