Abstract
Thellungiella halophila has been identified as a model system for understanding abiotic stress tolerance, and it shows extreme salt tolerance. Thellungiella is closely related to Arabidopsis, and its genes show 90% identity to those of Arabidopsis. Recently, full-length cDNA library with a total of 9,569 unique genes were constructed from Thellungiella plants treated with salinity, cold, freezing stresses or ABA treatment (Taji et al., 2008). Using ectopic expression of full-length cDNAs, a novel gain-of-function system, termed the FOX hunting system (Full-length cDNA Over-eXpressing gene hunting system) was developed. To identify the genes conferring salt tolerance to Arabidopsis plants, we developed two strategies of FOX hunting, a whole genome FOX hunting and several mini-scale FOX huntings. In the mini-scale FOX hunting, we extracted genes by their functions such as transporters, transcription factors and abiotic stress inducible genes from the cDNA library. We will summarize the progress of all our FOX huntings.
