Phenome analysis and systematic collection of homozygous transposon-tagged lines in Arabidopsis

Abstract

By using a variety of research resources, it is now able to investigate any knockout mutants for almost every gene in Arabidopsis. Arabidopsis is, then, not only a model plant for plant research, but also a model organism in which it is possible to carry out saturation mutagenesis in an organism. We constructed thousands of Ds transposon-tagged lines, which have a single insertion because of an advantage of Ac/Ds system. In this resource, we selected 4000 transposon-tagged lines with insertions in their gene-coding regions and systematically observed the visible phenotype of each line. Totally about 200 clear visible phenotypes were classified into 43 categories of morphological phenotypes. Phenotypic images have been entered into a searchable database (http://rarge.gsc.riken.jp/phenome/). Even if we could not detect visible phenotypes, we have selected homozygous transposon-tagged lines systematically. We think that this would be another useful resource for a collection of gene-knockout lines.