Question: Are there any plants you test in particular?

Yvette Wilson answered on 17 Jun 2010:

so far I have worked on 3 different plant species. The first is Arabidopsis thaliana – this is a very small weed that grows quickly. It also has a small genome. Most plant biologists work on it because you can do genetics projects quickly as it only takes ~6 weeks to go from seed to seed. Also its small genome meant that it was the easiest plant species to sequence the entire genome. This is a HUGE advantage because if I read that a particular gene has been found to do something in mice (for example!) I can take the DNA sequence of that gene and see if there is a similar sequence in the Arabidopsis genome. I can then see if anybody has made any mutations in that gene in Arabidopsis and can ask for the seed to see what the plant looks like and therefore what the function of that gene is.
The second species is the snapdragon (which is my favourite). Snapdragons have very active transposons (bits of DNA that cut themselves out of the chromosome and then reintegrate themselves somewhere else). researchers discovered that the transposons were particularly active at 15 C so would put plants at 15 degrees then grow the seed and look for plants that looked wierd! they would then find out what gene the transposon had jumped into and that way could infer what the gene does.
i now work on barley which is much much more difficult because it has a massive genome that will be very difficult to sequence fully and it takes about 6 months to go from seed to seed and therefore a long time to do genetic tests. BUT out of the cereal species it is one of the easiest to work on (except for rice) and the genes in barley and wheat are probably similar.

hope thats not too much info! 🙂 please keep asking!