Courtesy of Lynx Technologies
By conscious design, plant genomics initiatives have devoted initial resources to new technology development. Part of that money went to developing functional genomics approaches, and part to new sequencing technologies. Lynx's Massively Parallel Signature Sequencing (MPSS) approach, shown here, can decipher millions of sequence fragments – each represented by one bead in this image – simultaneously.
Plants are quieter than people. They might flaunt pollen at a passing bee or exude fragrance, but except for flashy bloomers, most do little to attract attention. Perhaps it is fitting, then, that plant genome initiatives have kept a low profile relative to the human genome project. Yet the lack of fanfare does not stem – so to speak – from a lack of merit: These initiatives are transforming how biologists do plant science and expanding what they hope to accomplish.
Key to that transformation, as in many other disciplines, ...
