Plant Bioinformatics Capstone

The past 15 years have been exciting ones in plant biology. Hundreds of plant genomes have been sequenced, RNA-seq has enabled transcriptome-wide expression profiling, and a proliferation of "-seq"-based methods has permitted protein-protein and protein-DNA interactions to be determined cheaply and in a high-throughput manner. These data sets in turn allow us to generate hypotheses at the click of a mouse or tap of a finger. In Plant Bioinformatics on Coursera.org, we covered 33 plant-specific online tools from genome browsers to transcriptomic data mining to promoter/network analyses and others, and in this Plant Bioinformatics Capstone we'll use these tools to hypothesize a biological role for a gene of unknown function, summarized in a written lab report.