Rice and reverse genetics as tools to study disease resistance in cereals

With its fully sequenced genome, the amenability to transformation and the availability of large collection of ESTs, rice has become a good genetic model for studying less amenable ceral species such as wheat or sugarcane. In the meantime, large transcriptome analyses are conducted on many crop species, including cereals. The emerging challenge is now to assign biological roles for the thousands of differentially expressed genes identified. One strategy is to use reverse genetics in rice to identify, among large insertion lines collections, lines harboring insertions in the gene(s) of interest. We are using this strategy in rice (and arabidopsis) to demonstrate the possible functional roles of genes known to be differentially expressed during the infection process. The approach will be described and some example of genes for which a possible function has been found will be given. (Texte intégral