Genetic Resources at the John Innes Centre

Introduction
Bacterial resources
Plant Genetic Resources

Introduction

Many activities at JIC are underpinned by our genetic stock collections of plants and microbes. These include precise genetics stocks (eg. mutants, chromosome addition and substitution lines), land races, cultivated varieties and wild plant accessions. They also include materials that are essential genomic resources, such as large insert and cDNA libraries. Our collections are major world resources for both plant and microbial scientists, and are made available for use by external academic and industrial groups.

Bacterial Genetics

Our work on bacteria is focussed on two organisms, Streptomyces coelicolor and Rhizobium leguminosarum, and programmes have given rise to a large pool of genetic resources. The Streptomyces research group acts both as a world-wide source of major items from the Streptomyces gene toolkit, and of large numbers of mutant derivatives of S. coelicolor. We also curate the ordered cosmid library that was used to generate the S. coelicolor genome sequence. Two recent developments will increase the importance of JIC's role as a source of Streptomyces genetic stocks. The first is a new comprehensive transposon mutant library. The second is the invention of a highly efficient PCR-targeted mutagenesis procedure, which we expect to generate defined mutations in virtually every Streptomyces gene. JIC maintains libraries of Rhizobium genes and many mutants that affect interactions with legumes. The gene library is currently being expanded by using broad gene-activation screens to identify Rhizobium genes that are induced in the rhizosphere and by stress.

Plant Germplasm

JIC is custodian of the UK's cereal genetic resources and maintains, characterises and distributes stocks from major collections of wheat and barley germplasm. JIC holds a major collection of pea germplasm, which is also the world's main working collection of pea mutants. We also hold defined stocks of Brassica, and mutant collections of Arabidopsis. These collections are a key resource for JIC science. JIC is in a unique position to exploit these genetic resources in combination with a genomics approach as a tool for gene discovery. The development of libraries of crop plant mutants, using novel approaches to mutagenesis that exploit genomics data, is enriching the precise genetic stocks we hold, distribute and exploit. We are also exploiting these resources in understanding and describing how allelic variation contributes to plant performance. This requires a large-scale genotyping and bioinformatics programme, in crop and model systems, that relates allelic variants to gene function. Combining our high throughput genotyping methodologies and new bioinformatic methods with our genetic stock collections will establish JIC as Europe's lead centre for the analysis and utilisation of germplasm data.

Further details of the JIC Germplasm Collections