Joint Genome Institute Plant Science Program

The Department of Energy Joint Genome Institute is funded to enable scientific advances that benefit the DOE research areas of bioenergy, global carbon cycling and biogeochemistry. These are accomplished through collaborative projects with JGI users including the three funded DOE BioEnergy Research Centers. The Plant Program is part of the JGI dedicated to applying advances in genomic technologies for understanding fundamental plant biology through comparative genomics and targeted experiments. Our major goal, in collaboration with plant scientists, is to apply this understanding from genomics to accelerate the improvement and domestication of biofuel crops. The JGI Plant program has produced many of the high-quality reference plant genomes available today and we continue to curate and make available comparative data and analysis via www.phytozome.net. Recently, the plant program has focused on projects that elucidate function of genes through comparative transcriptomics and directed experiments in our JGI Plant Flagship genomes. For these Plant Flagship genomes, we are continuing to improve the accuracy and completeness of the genome sequence and add data to update and improve the reference annotation. We are sequencing de novo genomes as comparators to the Plant Flagships, have introduced new advances into these pipelines, and have expanded our efforts on projects that use diversity of natural or structured populations to identify and link genotypes to phenotypes for plant traits important in biofuel crops.