Systematic phenotype analysis of arabidopsis Ds-tagged mutants to unravel gene functions in abiotic stress response as well as growth and development

By the availability of various mutant resources in Arabidopsis, it is now able to investigate mutant lines for almost every gene. Arabidopsis is, then, not only a model plant for plant research, but also a model species in which it is possible to carry out 'saturation mutagenesis' for all genes, and to totally analyze each gene and mutant of one organism. One of the future goals of 'phenome' project is to collect information of knockout-type mutant phenotypes for each Arabidopsis gene. We have generated thousands of Dissociation (Ds) transposon-tagged lines, which have a single insertion because of an advantage of Activator/Dissociation (Ac/Ds) system, and deposited it to the RIKEN BioResource Center. In this resource, we selected 4,000 transposon-tagged lines with a transposon insertion in gene-coding regions, and systematically observed the visible phenotype of each line as a first step of phenome analysis. Totally about 200 clear visible phenotypes were classified into 43 categories of morphological phenotypes. Phenotypic images have been entered into a searchable database. In parallel, we have been selecting homozygous transposon-insertional plants, which would be useful resources to detect other phenotypes than visible phenotypes. We are setting three categories of measurement to search various traits for total phenome analysis, such as physical, chemical or biological-methods. Recently, we started to investigate biological-measured phenotypes, which are stress-responsive or conditional phenotypes, using homozygous mutant resources. We are also collecting any mutant phenotype information from published reports in journal research activity to make a comprehensive phenotype database of Arabidopsis genes and mutants. (author)