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UGA researchers help papaya take genetic spotlight
Posted by: Prof. Dr. M. Raupp (IP Logged)
Date: May 06, 2008 09:26AM

By Stephanie Schupska
University of Georgia researchers are not looking to pull sweet fruit
from the papaya tree branches. They?re peering deeper to study its genes and
see how they compare to other plants.
University of Georgia researchers are not looking to pull sweet fruit
from the papaya tree branches. They?re peering deeper to study its genes and
see how they compare to other plants.

Researchers with the UGA Plant Genome Mapping Laboratory helped to
write two articles involving the fruit as either the focus or a major
player. One article appeared April 24 in Nature magazine, the other April 25
in Science.

?Two articles in consecutive days in journals like these makes for
quite a week,? said Andrew Paterson, the lab?s director. He is also a
Georgia Research Alliance Eminent Scholar with UGA?s College of Agricultural
and Environmental Sciences.

For the Nature article, Paterson and five scientists at the lab worked
with an international team to sequence the papaya?s genes. The team was lead
by Ray Ming, a professor at the University of Illinois and Paterson?s former
post-doctoral student.

Getting back to Nature
The papaya is the fifth angiosperm, or flowering plant, to have its
genes completely sequenced and published. The others are Arabidopsis in
2000, rice in 2002 and grape and poplar in 2007.

Papaya is an agricultural crop in tropical climates. It ranks first in
nutritional values among 38 common fruits, based on its vitamin and mineral
content. It is the source of papain, an enzyme used in meat tenderizer and
medical applications.

The researchers were surprised to find that papaya has fewer genes
than the simple Arabidopsis, a small plant in the mustard family.
Arabidopsis is commonly used to study plant genetics and genomics. The
papaya also has sex chromosomes, a rarity in plants.

?Papaya turns out to be a promising botanical model,? Paterson said.
?It?s potentially useful as a system to unravel which gene performs which
function, and also useful in helping us tie together the genetic blueprints
of all angiosperms.?

The papaya cultivar used for the study was one genetically modified to
resist ringspot disease, a virus that almost wiped out papaya farming in
Hawaii. It?s the first genetically modified plant to be so fully sequenced.

Taking the lead in Science
The article in Science magazine compares papaya?s gene strands with
those of poplar, grape and Arabidopsis. UGA graduate student Haibao Tang was
the lead author of that article. It explains how UGA researchers are
building computer models to see how plants have changed from their ancestors
to what they are today, said UGA scientist John Bowers.

?It gives us a visualization of how these plants are related to each
other,? Bowers said.

The computer models will also help scientists to figure out what genes
actually do.

?For many of what we recognize as genes, no one has a clue what they
do,? Paterson said.

By studying Arabidopsis, poplar, grape and papaya gene strands side by
side, Paterson and other scientists are hoping to learn what certain genes
do in these plants. This will allow them to make an educated guess about
what the same gene does in cotton, for example.

The idea to do this kind of analysis has been around since the turn of
the last century, Paterson said. But it wasn?t until the last year that
there has been enough information to compare different plants on the
whole-genome level.

And now the gene sequences are giving the UGA lab an opportunity to
practice its research prowess to better understand all flowering plants,
including most major crops.

For more information about the UGA Plant Genome Mapping Laboratory,
visit the Web site www.plantgenome.uga.edu.



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