Improving the Connections Between Gene Expression and Plant Traits

Perturbation of environmental or genetic variables greatly influences gene expression in plants. Gene expression experiments are typically designed to measure these differences with the goal of connecting transcriptional changes to important plant traits. This work often leads to a better understanding of the biological processes under study but seldom results in the identification of reduced sets of causal genes. Here we present the use of network and classification approaches to help reduce sets of differentially expressed genes to those most likely to influence the trait of interest. Here we present the utility of these approaches using publicly available data in barley and demonstrate the ability to pinpoint key candidate genes using only a portion of the available data.