Functional genomics: Gene identification via T-DNA mediated gene trap tagging in plants

The fully sequenced genomes of Arabidopsis, rice, tomato, potato, maize, wheat, and soybean offer large amounts of information about cellular and developmental biology. It is a central challenge of genomics to use this information in discovering the function of proteins and identifying developmentally important genes. Although classical genetic approaches to gene identification which rely on disruption of a gene leading to a recognizable phenotype continues to be an extremely successful one, T-DNA mediated gene trap tagging which has been developed that utilize random integration of reporter gene constructs has also proven to be an extremely powerful tool in plant cellular developmental biology. In this review, how gene trap tagging, promoter trap tagging, and enhancer trap tagging detection systems have been applied to plant biology is described and these gene identification techniques could be useful to the plant molecular biology and plant biotechnology community.