Construction of a Functional Gene Network for Poplar

Poplar is one of the fastest growing tree species in temperate climates and has many characteristics suitable for biofuel feedstock.  The goal of the proposed research is to employ network based and systems level approaches to reconstruct gene interaction networks for Populus spp.. We have constructed a conservative baseline poplar network, by orthology driven projection from the Arabidopsis probabilistic gene network, AraNet  (http://www.functionalnet.org/aranet/).  This AraNet based poplar network was enriched with interactions identified by the Arabidiopsis Interactiome Consortium (http://interactome.dfci.harvard.edu/A_thaliana/) which include 6200 highly reliable proteome-wide interactions between 2700 proteins.  In addition, 83 protein-protein interactions among 89 genes experimentally verified to be interacting in poplar wood forming tissue (identified by the poplar biomass interactome project; http://xylome.vbi.vt.edu/) were also included into the projected network.  Thus derived  poplar functional network has close to 18K unique gene models (nodes) with close to 2 million interactions (edges).  We plan to extract several sub-networks from the genome wide poplar functional network to elucidate gene sets that would play crucial roles during specific biological processes such as stress response.