The Roles of Bioinformatics on Plant Genomics Research

A special issue of Plants (ISSN 2223-7747). This special issue belongs to the section "Plant Genetics, Genomics and Biotechnology".

Deadline for manuscript submissions: closed (31 July 2021) | Viewed by 3055

Special Issue Editors


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Guest Editor
Helmholtz Zentrum Munich, 85764 Munich, Germany
Interests: bioinformatics; genomics; transcriptome analysis; microbiome

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Guest Editor
Department of Ecology, Evolution, and Organismal Biology, Iowa State University, Ames, IA 50010, USA
Interests: plant and animal genomics; bioinformatics; phylogenomics; comparative genomics; evolutionary biology

Special Issue Information

Dear Colleagues,

Bioinformatics tools can streamline entire data analysis processes including read quantification, pathways analysis, and gene annotation in genomics or may determine putative protein structures in proteomics. Such bioinformatics tools can also solve rather specific challenges, e.g., detection of certain types of repetitive elements or promoter analysis. 

In the last few years, there has been a shift towards cloud-based resources and strategies where different software can be combined within one platform to install and update bioinformatics tools, e.g., bioconda, and, therefore, to share knowledge between different computational laboratories. Typically, the infrastructure is provided by one or several institutes allowing experimental labs to make use of these resources. 

For this Special Issue, we encourage studies that review currently available tools for the analysis of plant-centric datasets such as genomics or transcriptomics when enabled by novel strategies such as Kubernetes, Docker, Galaxy, and web services along with bioinformatics pipelines that make use of either open-source software. Articles that fit into this Special Issue could, e.g., illustrate guidelines of currently available web services to use or efficient strategies with novel techniques to tackle challenges in plant-centric genomics or proteomics analysis.

Dr. Thomas Nussbaumer
Dr. Arun Seetharam
Guest Editors

Manuscript Submission Information

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Keywords

  • system biology
  • bioinformatics
  • functional genomics
  • cell signaling
  • functional prediction
  • protein–protein interactions
  • comparative genomics

Published Papers (1 paper)

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Research

18 pages, 17768 KiB  
Article
Seeing the Forest through the (Phylogenetic) Trees: Functional Characterisation of Grapevine Terpene Synthase (VviTPS) Paralogues and Orthologues
by Samuel J. Smit, Melané A. Vivier and Philip R. Young
Plants 2021, 10(8), 1520; https://doi.org/10.3390/plants10081520 - 26 Jul 2021
Cited by 2 | Viewed by 2479
Abstract
Gene families involved in specialised metabolism play a key role in a myriad of ecophysiological and biochemical functions. The Vitis vinifera sesquiterpene synthases represent the largest subfamily of grapevine terpene synthase (VviTPS) genes and are important volatile metabolites for wine flavour [...] Read more.
Gene families involved in specialised metabolism play a key role in a myriad of ecophysiological and biochemical functions. The Vitis vinifera sesquiterpene synthases represent the largest subfamily of grapevine terpene synthase (VviTPS) genes and are important volatile metabolites for wine flavour and aroma, as well as ecophysiological interactions. The functional characterisation of VviTPS genes is complicated by a reliance on a single reference genome that greatly underrepresents this large gene family, exacerbated by extensive duplications and paralogy. The recent release of multiple phased diploid grapevine genomes, as well as extensive whole-genome resequencing efforts, provide a wealth of new sequence information that can be utilised to overcome the limitations of the reference genome. A large cluster of sesquiterpene synthases, localised to chromosome 18, was explored by means of comparative sequence analyses using the publicly available grapevine reference genome, three PacBio phased diploid genomes and whole-genome resequencing data from multiple genotypes. Two genes, VviTPS04 and -10, were identified as putative paralogues and/or allelic variants. Subsequent gene isolation from multiple grapevine genotypes and characterisation by means of a heterologous in planta expression and volatile analysis resulted in the identification of genotype-specific structural variations and polymorphisms that impact the gene function. These results present novel insight into how grapevine domestication likely shaped the VviTPS landscape to result in genotype-specific functions. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue The Roles of Bioinformatics on Plant Genomics Research)
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