Enhancing the Anaerobic Response

Proteome analysis, and more recently DNA chip technology, hasled to the identification of a large number of genes that areimplicated in the anaerobic response of plants. As a result,an increasingly complex picture of the response in terms ofbiochemical and regulatory processes is emerging. A challengeis to find out more about the function of these newly identifiedgene products, and how they contribute to flooding tolerance.Our approach has been to manipulate levels of candidate geneproducts (using sense and antisense constructs) in the modelsystem Arabidopsis thaliana, combined with biochemical and phenotypicanalysis of the resulting transgenic plants.