Transcriptional Control of Gene Expression

 

Compared with other cultivated Solanaceous plants N. tabacum has a very large genome size with approximately 4.5 billion base pairs (~ 1.5 times the size of the human genome). The Tobacco Genome Initiative (TGI) has generated over one million gene-space sequence reads (GSRs) from methylation-filtered (MF) tobacco genomic DNA libraries prepared from "Hicks Broadleaf", a highly inbred and fairly homozygous cultivar. The availability of these GSRs facilitates genome wide-analysis, large-scale functional genomics and gene discovery.
 
The transcriptional regulation of gene expression is a major control point in many biological processes and plant genomes devote approximately 7% of their coding sequence to transcription factors (TFs). We have performed an in silico analysis of 1.15 million gene space sequence reads from the tobacco nuclear genome and report the detailed analysis of over 2,500 tobacco transcription factors (TFs). The tobacco genome contains at least one member of each of the 64 well-characterized TF families identified in sequenced vascular plant genomes, indicating that evolution of the Solanaceae was not associated with the gain or loss of TF families.
 
Visit the publicly available TOBFAC: The database of tobacco transcription factors website.