New Nature paper from Brady Lab describes an important gene regulatory network in Arabidopsis

Various members of the Genome Center are co-authors on a new Nature paper that describes a protein-DNA network between Arabidopsis thaliana transcription factors and secondary cell wall metabolic genes:

• An Arabidopsis gene regulatory network for secondary cell wall synthesis 

The lead author on this paper is Mallorie Taylor-Teeples, a graduate student who works in the lab of Assistant Professor Siobhan Brady (one of two corresponding authors on the paper). Various other Brady lab members were also co-authors on this paper along with two other Genome Center Faculty: Daniel Kliebenstein and Ilias Tagkopoulos. Siobhan Brady commented that understanding secondary cell walls is important because it is these cell walls that ultimately form the woody tissue of plants and they therefore represent the majority of renewable plant biomass that is available world-wide.

This paper describes the gene regulatory network that regulates plant secondary cell wall synthesis and certain types of patterns that are found in this network.

Other news sources have also featured this work:

• Scientific American — How to Manipulate Plants to Build a Better Biofuel
• UC Davis Egghead blog — Unraveling root growth control network