The Tobacco Genome Initiative – 10 Years Later…

The importance of the genus Nicotiana is both economic, as it contains species which are major cash crops, and scientific, as many of the species’ genomes are highly complex due to their evolutionary history. Investigating these species has been accelerated by advances in “Omics” techniques; these high-throughput methods, nucleic acid sequencing in particular, have led to an explosion in the volume of data available.

Here we provide an overview of how these data are organized and stored as public genome resources, as well as how researchers can mine or otherwise use them to answer scientific questions by constructing microarrays from expressed sequence tag (EST) and genomic data, creating species-specific metabolic pathway repositories, or using genomic sequences in proteogenomics studies.

We further examine the development of Nicotiana resources over the last 10 years, since the Tobacco Genome Initiative was announced at PAGXI in 2003. We follow-up with the objectives and progress of current Nicotiana genome sequencing projects in the field, in particular for N. tabacum, N. sylvestris, N. tomentosiformis, and N. benthamiana, which are part of the SOL100 target list. Finally, we look at how these data can be leveraged in the future to make the crucial link between the genomics and phenomics.