CoPIs: Robert DeSalle (American Museum Natural History), W. Richard McCombie (Cold Spring Harbor Laboratories), Dennis E. Shasha (New York University), and Dennis W. Stevenson (New York Botanical Garden)
Senior Personnel: Eric Brenner (New York Botanical Garden), Manpreet Katari (New York University), Ernest Lee (American Museum of Natural History), and Robert Martienssen (Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory)
The goal of this project is to exploit plant genome diversity to discover new genes involved in the development of seeds. This project combines the expertise of scientists from four research/educational institutions specializing in evolution and genomics to build upon a previously funded pilot project to generate new data, resources, and bioinformatic tools and analytical pipelines to enable functional trait-to-gene predictions for any species based on phylogeny and/or machine learning approaches. It is envisioned that the data and software resources generated will empower Comparative Genomic researchers to exploit plant diversity to identify genes associated with any trait of interest or economic value. All sequence data will be available at GenBank and all germplasm through the New York Botanical Gardens. In addition, the public can access data, tools, and resources generated from this project at the following links: OrthologID (http://nypg.bio.nyu.edu/orthologid), BIGPLANTv1 (http://nypg.bio.nyu.edu/orthologid/bigplant) and ViCoGenTA (http://nypg.bio.nyu.edu/vicogenta).