Leaves are of basic to life on earth, representing the powerhouses of most food chains and involved in the biochemical and physiological functioning such as photosynthesis, this ultimately, the source of energy that maintain humanity.There are few genes which influence meristomatic pattern formation and the rate of leaf primordial initiation determination of leaf length (ROT3), (LNG) and width (AN), with less being known about the determination of leaf size. Mutations in the genes will represent the variations in leaf size, shape, development. Use of microarrays is now a fast established method with transcriptomics. Microarrays allow the aligned profiling of all genes in a genome; allow the application of microarrays to identify patterns of gene expression associated with a trait of interest.
In using clustering method to microarray data groups of genes exhibiting similar expression profiles are identified, a single ‘master regulator’ will control the expression of many genes as an efficient way of initiating gene expression ‘programs’. Leaf development occurs progression through multiple, successive, modules of a developmental program running from primordia initiation to leaf maturity. These modules can be identified by profiling gene expressions in the filed grown plants, and these modules are broadly defined as ‘cell division’, ‘cell elongation‘, and ‘differentiation/maturation.
UPSC-BASE, a database repository with integrated transcriptomics analysis tools for our own Populus cDNA microarray platform, which contains largest collection of transcriptomics data available for Populus.
