Technology complementation

Gene tagging by insertional mutagenesis

Mutations causing loss of function have been the traditional tool of the geneticist to decipher the functions of genes. When T-DNA or transposons are used to make collections of mutations there is the added advantage that the insertion can serve as a tag to isolate the mutant gene. This approach has proven to be very powerful and has contributed to the assignment of functions to scores of genes.

HairpinRNAi produces a range of phenotypes from partial to complete loss of function, thereby allowing one to study genes whose loss of function is lethal.

CSIRO and other research teams have developed inducible RNAi systems that permit silencing of the target gene only at specified stages of plant growth and development. The use of regulated promoters in the hairpinRNAi construct provides precision of gene knock out.

The speed of hairpinRNAi helps analyse groups of genes with similar knock out phenotypes.

Genome sequencing and bioinformatics

HairpinRNAi provides a rapid method of confirming gene function. The complete genome sequences of Arabidopsis and rice, along with the sequences of several animal and microbial genomes, has helped infer gene function by sequence comparison.

Gene Profiling

Gene profiling experiments identify genes up or down regulated by treatments such as drought, disease etc. The function of these specific sets of genes can be rapidly identified by high throughput hairpinRNAi.