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Genetic Screens to Identify Plant Stress Genes

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Plant Stress Tolerance

Part of the book series: Methods in Molecular Biology ((MIMB,volume 639))

Abstract

A powerful means to learn about gene functions in a developmental or physiological context in an organism is to isolate the corresponding mutants with altered phenotypes. Diverse mutagenic agents, including chemical and biological, have been widely employed, and each comes with its own advantages and inconveniences. For Arabidopsis thaliana, whose genome sequence is publicly available, the reliance of reverse genetics to understand the relevant roles of genes particularly those coding for proteins in growth and development is now a common practice. Identifying multiple alleles at each locus is important because they can potentially reveal epistatic relationship in a signaling pathway or components belonging to a common signaling complex by their synergistic or even allele-specific enhancement of the phenotypic severity. In this article, we describe mutagenesis by using ethyl methanesulfonate (EMS) and transfer (T)-DNA-mediated insertion or activation tagging as applied to the most widely used genetic plant model A. thaliana. Also, we demonstrate the utility of several genetic screening approaches to dissect adaptive responses to various abiotic stresses.

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Acknowledgment

This work was supported by EU Grant no. FP6-020232-2, TéT grant no. FR-34/2008 and OTKA Grant no. K-68226.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Institute of Plant Biology, Biological Research Center, Szeged, Hungary

    Csaba Papdi, Mary Prathiba Joseph, Imma Perez Salamó & László Szabados

  2. Institut des Sciences du Vegetal, CNRS, Gif sur Yvette, France

    Jeffrey Leung

Authors
  1. Csaba Papdi
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  2. Jeffrey Leung
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  3. Mary Prathiba Joseph
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  4. Imma Perez Salamó
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  5. László Szabados
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Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. 246 NRC-D, Department of Biochemistry and Molecular, Oklahoma State University, Stillwater, 74078, Oklahoma, USA

    Ramanjulu Sunkar

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© 2010 Humana Press

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Papdi, C., Leung, J., Joseph, M.P., Salamó, I.P., Szabados, L. (2010). Genetic Screens to Identify Plant Stress Genes. In: Sunkar, R. (eds) Plant Stress Tolerance. Methods in Molecular Biology, vol 639. Humana Press. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-60761-702-0_7

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-60761-702-0_7

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  • Publisher Name: Humana Press

  • Print ISBN: 978-1-60761-701-3

  • Online ISBN: 978-1-60761-702-0

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