Plant Transcriptional Factors
and Regulatory Networks

Legume as Model Feedstock and Bioenergy Crops



  • Legume provides a valuable protein source for human and animal consumption and is also an important feedstock for biodiesel production. It interacts with soil-borne bacteria (Rhizobia) that capture atmospheric nitrogen and store it in the soil, a beneficial side-effect utilized during crop rotation. In an effort to unlock the full power of these plants, scientists have completely sequenced the soybean and medicago genomes, partially sequenced cowpea, common bean, and lotus etc. legume genomes.

  • Legume crops have an overall positive impact on the environment as well, in particular a lower fossil energy consumption and lower GHG emissions, which can minimise the input of fossil energy in agriculture and industry energy production and are considered as part of a bioenergy policy.

Common Bean

04/12/2010 --- about 415K common bean gene space sequences were clustered and assembled into 65,982, 62,359, 61,685 unigenes, respectively, for the first, 2nd and 3rd test runs; unigenes and gene spaces available for blast search and retrieveAll.

04/13/2010 --- Gene spaces against Refseq for coding potentail detection done with coding potentail of 48.90%.

04/23/2010 --- Annotation of both gene spaces and unigenes against NR.aa, uniref, Refseq, and uniprot is completely done.

Cowpea

04/09/2010 --- contacted Vikram for transcriptional factor data.

04/10/2010 --- cowpea gene space, unigenes, and ESTs etc. available again for blast search.

06/17/2010 --- Preapplication of legumes as bioenergy model organisms sent to DoE Genomic Science and Technology for Bioenergy and Environment (DE-FOA-0000368).

Soybean

04/10/2010 --- soybean proteome, CDS, and cDNA are available for blast search.

04/11/2010 --- soybean retrieveAll working for sequences retrieval.

04/20/2010 --- Letter of Intent sent to USDA RFA on soybean drought tolerance.

05/13/2010 --- Letter of Intent got approved for full proposal on aquaculture genomics and bioinformatics.