Friendly blogger Pamela Roland, the author of Tomorrow's Table: Organic Farming, Genetics, and the Future of Food which I am reading right now (and which was recently reviewed in PLoS Biology), has just had a paper published in PLoS Genetics:
Rice, a model monocot, is the first crop plant to have its entire genome sequenced. Although genome-wide transcriptome analysis tools and genome-wide, gene-indexed mutant collections have been generated for rice, the functions of only a handful of rice genes have been revealed thus far. Functional genomics approaches to studying crop plants like rice are much more labor-intensive and difficult in terms of maintaining the plants than when studying Arabidopsis, a model dicot. Here, we describe an efficient method for dissecting gene function in rice and other crop plants. We identified light response-related phenotypes for ten genes, the functions for which were previously unknown in rice. We also carried out co-expression analysis of 72 genes involved in specific biochemical pathways connected in lines carrying mutations in these ten genes. This analysis led to the identification of a novel set of genes likely involved in these pathways. The rapid progress of functional genomics in crops will significantly contribute to overcoming a food crisis in the near future.