Gene Sequence Tags

GARNet funded Jim Beyon and his group at Warwick HRI to sequence gene-specific sequence tags for a subset of the 28,000 genes in Arabidopsis.

CATMA
The creation of these gene-specific sequence tags (GSTs) allowed Warwick HRI to joined the CATMA (Complete Arabidopsis Thaliana Micro-Array) consortium. The aim of the CATMA project is the design and production of high quality GSTs covering most Arabidopsis genes. By combining resources from the national programmes of several EU countries the CATMA consortium produced some 24,000 (GSTs) from the Arabidopsis genome. Each GST was designed to be 150-500 bp in length and no more than 70% identical to any other Arabidopsis sequence. These are being used to produce microarrays consisting of 21,000 amplicons which are available from NASC.

AGRIKOLA
The CATMA GSTs have also acted as the starting point for AGRIKOLA. The AGRIKOLA project (co-ordinated by Ian Small, INRA, Evry) aims to produce an RNAi (RNA interference) resource for the Arabidopsis community. RNAi allows a researcher to switch of a particular gene in Arabidopsis by the expression of a double stranded interfering RNA. The AGRIKOLA consortium aims to clone all of the CATMA GSTs into GATEWAY pDONOR entry vectors and make them freely available to the research community via NASC by the end of 2004.