Project Title: The Green Plant BAC library Project - Public resources for studying evolution, physiology and developement. (Funded by National Science Foundation)

The BAC Green Plant project is designed to accomplish three goals:
1) Construction of high-quality BAC libraries, clones and filter arrays which will provide a genomic resource for all plant biologists. This will give all plant biologists access to a much wider range of species and will allow everyone to address questions on topics from molecules to gross morphology.

2) In an analogy to the extremely successful focus on two model systems, Arabidopsis and rice, focusing experts in green algae, non-seed land plants, and seed plants (including flowering plants) on genes critical for understanding plant form and function will speed progress in understanding how land plants arose and diversified.

3) Use Bioinformatics and easy-to-use web sites to help the genomic community access the BAC resources that will be built. Workshops to train people to use these BAC resources will most quickly spread their usage.
The long-term goal of this project is to provide the resources, through the production of BAC libraries, for future research to elucidate the genetic basis for the transitions that mark the most fundamentally important steps in green plant evolution.

This project would also help to answer the fundamental biological question: what is the genetic basis for the key innovations that enabled the green plants to diversify from aquatic unicellular or simple colonial life forms to life on land, an evolution that has led to the flowering plants as the dominant life form on earth today? This can be done by providing the plant science community with new and fundamentally important set of deep-coverage large-insert BAC libraries for examining the genetic basis of these innovations.