Poster: Secondary metabolism

Abs # 276: A systems based approach for the functional identification of plant rubber biosynthetic genes

Presenter:	Shintani, David , shintani@unr.edu
Authors	Shintani, David  (A)   Katrina, Cornish  (B)
Affiliations:	(A): University Of Nevada, Department of Biochemistry (B): USDA-ARS, Western Region Research Center

Natural rubber is an important plant commodity required in the manufacture of numerous products. Although it is important to all industrialized societies, it has not yet been exploited through biotechnological means. The reason for this is that biochemical methods have failed to functionally identify proteins/genes directly involved in rubber biosynthesis. While plant rubber biosynthesis is a difficult problem to study using classical biochemical approaches, it is well suited for modern proteomic and genomic based technologies. 2-D PAGE analyses of purified rubber particles have shown that these vesicles contain at most 200 individual proteins. This relatively small number of proteins and their corresponding genes could be easily identified using advanced proteomic and genomic based techniques. We are currently taking such an approach in guayule to identify candidate rubber biosynthetic genes/proteins. These genes will subsequently be functionally analyzed in vivo for their possible role in rubber biosynthesis using our reverse genetic system, Russian Dandelion. Our research strategy and a summary of our efforts to functionally identify plant rubber biosynthetic genes will be presented.