Achievement

Recently, one of our IGERT students, Natalie Castellana and her collaborators employed proteogenomic methods to improve the gene annotation of Arabidopsis thaliana. Our method extended computational techniques to give confidence values for the genes we discovered as well as for the alterations we suggested for current gene models. In addition, we were able to generate gene models for 778 novel protein-coding genes, and suggested refinements to 695 gene models. As genes encode proteins, precise and direct analysis of genome-wide protein sequences as completed in our study has led to defining the sequences of a vast number of new genes and proteins in the Arabidopsis genome, which are already being used by the global plant research community. The success of Natalie’s research with biologists and computer scientists demonstrates the great opportunity of our program. Furthermore, the developed methods and approaches should benefit other genome efforts.