A Network for Rice

In PNAS, the University of California, Davis' Pamela Ronald has a paper introducing RiceNet, a genome-scale model of how rice genes interact. She and her colleagues then applied it to a study of stress response, and identified three regulator proteins. They also show that the network can also predict gene function in maize. "With RiceNet, instead of working on one gene at a time based on data from a single experimental set, we can predict the function of entire networks of genes, as well as entire genetic pathways that regulate a particular biological process, RiceNet represents a systems biology approach that draws from diverse and large datasets for rice and other organisms," Ronald adds at her blog Tomorrow's Table.