Fragaria Vesca Strawberry Functional Genomics     Strawberry Functional Genomics Strawberry is a member of the Rosaceae family that includes many valuable fruit and ornamental crops, with an annual crop value of approximately $7 billion. Genomic resources for Rosaceae species are rapidly becoming available with information from EST sequences, markers, linkage maps and physical maps. The Rosaceae Genomic Executive Committee (RosEx) has promoted strawberry as a translational genomics model due to its unique biological features and transformability for fruit trait improvement. In collaboration with faculties of Virginia Tech and IALR, our overall research goal is to use functional genomic and metabolic approaches to pursue high throughput gene discovery in a diploid strawberry, Fragaria vesca as it has advantages of a fleshy fruit typical of most fruit crops, short life cycle (seed to seed in 12-16 weeks), small genome size (206 Mbp/C), small plant size, and many seeds per plant. We have improved our current Agrobacterium-mediated strawberry transformation methods using both kanamycin and hygromycin selection. With our improved kanamycin transformation system we are able to produce up to 98 independent kanamycin resistant insertional mutant lines using a T-DNA construct carrying an AcDs Launchpad system from a single transformation experiment involving inoculation of 22 leaf explants of Fv accession 551572. We are characterizing the insertional mutants. Gene discovery resulting from current analyses of the mutant collection may lead to development of transgenic or cisgenic fruit crops that have various commercial advantages. Add this page to your favorite Social Networking websites