A Plant Interactome Network Map

Funded by a Plant Genome Research Program grant from the National Science Foundation

Our PGRP Plant Interactome Project pertains to the development of a large-scale, high coverage binary protein-protein interaction or "interactome" map for plants that should represent a starting point for systems-level studies in plants. The recent completion of whole genome sequences for several plant species has revealed an enormous amount of conservation among their encoded proteins. This high level of conservation suggests that the development of proteome-wide maps using a few well-studied reference plant species is a cost effective approach to advance plant research as a whole. Importantly, this project is expected to have broad implications for research on economically important plant species that are more difficult to study.

Building on earlier work from CCSB and the Salk Institute, this project utilizes an existing set of cDNA-derived plant open-reading-frame (ORF) clones to construct a high-coverage "plant interactome mapping resource". A high quality plant protein interactome network map is generated using two complementary approaches: an improved yeast 2-hybrid assay and a protein microarray-based approach. A set of ~12,000 Arabidopsis genes for which full-length protein-encoding ORFs have already been cloned and sequence validated represents the scaffold of this project. In addition a set of 2,500 rice ORF clones targeted to two biological areas (plant innate immunity and kinase signal transduction pathways) will be used to expand the rice interactome network map.

All of the interaction data, ORF clones, and DNA sequences will be made freely available to the research community through our own websites and through established plant databases such as Gramene and TAIR.