New ‘corn atlas’ shows which genes are active during each stage of plant growth

University of Wisconsin - Madison
May 10, 2011

Just as a road atlas helps travelers find their way, a new corn atlas will help plant scientists navigate vast amounts of gene expression data from the corn plant, as described in the May 10 issue of The Plant Journal.

The atlas, developed by a team of scientists from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and Michigan State University, tells researchers which of corn's 50,000 genes are actively expressed in various parts of the plant during each of the major stages of plant development.

"The atlas is basically the whole landscape of the plant's transcriptome. It contains information about all of the genes in corn — where they're expressed and when they're expressed," says Rajandeep Sekhon, the study's co-lead author, a research associate in the Great Lakes Bioenergy Research Center at UW-Madison.

Read more