By Kim Tedrow
With a three-year, $1.6 million grant from the U.S. Department of Energy, the University of Nebraska–Lincoln’s Chi Zhang, Edgar Cahoon and Bin Yu will focus on the genome-wide identification of small gene fragments called microexons to advance knowledge on gene functions and regulation for oil accumulation and stress response in sorghum.
Sorghum is the fifth most important cereal grain globally, valued for its nutritional benefits and used as food, feed stock and for biofuels. In the United States, it is the third-largest cereal grain produced and is often grown in dryland areas because of its drought resistance. The Department of Energy’s focus on sorghum is as a biomass energy feedstock.
Microexons are miniscule coding elements in a gene, containing from one to 15 nucleotides, the basic building blocks in DNA; the regular exons can contain dozens or hundreds. Because they are so small and difficult to detect, microexons had been largely overlooked in plant genome research. That has consequences, because altering or omitting even one nucleotide in a gene can change an entire protein sequence, which can affect phenotypic expression.
Source : unl.edu