Transposon tagging in Medicago truncatula 

          Medicago truncatula is a fast emerging model plant species, especially for legumes. Several genomic tools and resources are already available for M. truncatula. Funding from NSF and the Noble Foundation has resulted in an extensive database of over 226,000 M. truncatula ESTs (http://www.tigr.org/tigr-scripts/tgi/T_index.cgi?species=medicago) and an ongoing genome sequencing project to be completed by 2007 (http://www.medicago.org/genome). Gene expression, protein and metabolite profiling tools are also available for M. truncatula (http://www.noble.org/medicago). In spite of all these genomic resources, it is still a daunting task to determine gene function. An extensive collection of M. truncatula mutant populations is needed to address gene function. Currently there are no, publicly available, large collections of M. truncatula mutants. With the M. truncatula genome sequencing project approaching completion, availability of a large collection of insertion mutants will be vital for M. truncatula to become a more successful model organism. 
          M. truncatula has been selected as a model plant to study biological processes that are unique and pertinent to legumes, and that cannot easily be studied in Arabidopsis. IN collaboration with Dr. Pascal Ratet, CNRS, France, We have developed a fast and efficient tagging system for M. truncatula which will be an invaluable resource for legume functional genomics. The main objective of this project is to do a near-saturation mutagenesis of Medicago truncatula using a tobacco retrotransposon Tnt1.  Development of Tnt1 insertion lines will help M. truncatula to become a more successful model plant to understand legume plant biology.  Information and materials generated from this project will be made freely available to the scientific community. This project is funded by the Samuel Roberts Noble Foundation and NSF Plant Genome Program award # DBI 0703285.

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