Lee H. Pratt

Our laboratory is collaborating on two pine gene discovery projects.

One of the projects is supported by a grant from the USDA/IFAFS program and is led by Dr. David Neale at the University of California, Davis. The overall objective of this program is well described by its title: "Allele Discovery for Genes Controlling Economic Traits in Loblolly Pine." The link associated with this title will take you to the web site for this project as a whole. Our role in the project is to obtain ESTs from 11,000 cDNA clones and to provide related bioinformatic support. The objective of this part of the project is to identify candidate genes associated with water deficit. Libraries are being prepared by Dr. W. Walter Lorenz in the laboratory of Dr. Jeffrey Dean, using pine samples coming from co-PIs at the University of Florida.

The other project is headed by Dr. Jeffrey Dean in the UGA School of Forest Resources. It is funded through the NSF Plant Genome Program, beginning September 1, 2002. Other co-PIs include Dr. Sarah Covert and Dr. Scott Merkle, also in the UGA School of Forest Resources. The rationale and specific objectives of this project, entitled "Transcriptome Responses to Environmental Conditions in Loblolly Pine Roots," is available on the page to which the title links. We will participate by obtaining and placing in the public domain approximately 140,000 ESTs (3' and 5') from about half that number of cDNAs. Libraries will be prepared from pine tissues of commercial and biological significance, especially roots undergoing a variety of biotic and abiotic stresses. These data will, insofar as possible, be integrated with those produced by other public pine EST projects. We will also provide bioinformatic support, not only to this EST effort but also to linked microarray experiments.

Additional information about the NSF-funded pine project can be found in the poster presented at the 2002 NSF Awardees Meeting. Please note that this is a *.pdf file with a file size of 386 KB.

[This material is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation under Grant No. 0211807.  Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation.]