RevGenUK the next generation: establishing a TILLING boutique for a UK-based reverse genetics community resource

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In an ever changing climate, we are constantly trying to improve crops to achieve more sustainable agricultural practices. To do this, we need to understand in great detail how plants grow and work. Genetics is a powerful tool for helping us to obtain such an understanding. Using it we are able to analyse the whole genetic make-up (the genome) of plants to discover all the genes required for them to develop and operate correctly. We can use this information to study variants that have a defect in a particular gene (or genes) in which we are interested. This helps us to understand how the gene works when it is operating normally and its role in the plant. Many species of plant have had their whole genome sequenced already, but there are still thousands of their genes whose role in the plant is not understood. To obtain plants that bear a defective gene we can treat seeds with a chemical or radiation that damages the DNA coding for that gene. The offspring from these treated seeds will bear a large number of defects in their genomes. By producing a large population of offspring we can make every gene in the genome bear a defect. The problem then is to find the plant in the population that has a defect in the gene in which you are interested. We have developed methods that can sort out defective genes of interest and find the plants that contain them, so we can find out the role of the gene. This whole process is known as reverse genetics. No one chemical or physical means can induce all the defects we need to study particular genes so we need to use several different methods. In a previous project we set up a resource for the plant science research community so that they can discover the function of their particular genes of interest. We did this for legumes and brassicas (treated with chemicals) that contain plants bearing different forms of defective genes, but now we would like to do it for major UK cereal crops to help both scientists and plant breeders. We have developed special methods based on high throughput machines (sequencers) that can detect the defects when compared to the normal gene. Now we wish to develop methods that will do this in a more efficient and cost-effective manner. Scientists can then send us information about the gene of interest, for example, a gene from oats or barley, and we can then look for defects in their specific gene in our populations of thousands of plants. We then send them seeds from the plant that they can grow to study the action of the defective gene in that plant. All the information that we gather about our plants and their thousand upon thousands of genes will be stored in a computer database that we have constructed especially for this project, although it will be written in such a way that others can use it as well. It will also be available to use on the worldwide web so that a scientist anywhere in the UK or the World can come and browse to see if the database contains information about their gene of interest. The reason for wanting to do this is to improve the ability of crop plants to grow in different environments, especially adverse ones, to improve the quality of our food, and to help the farmer work in a sustainable way using less added fertiliser and fewer herbicides and pesticides.