Chapter Seven Biopanning by activation tagging

This chapter focuses on biopanning by activation tagging. Extensive gene duplication in plants and the potential of functional redundancy among homologous sequences represent a hurdle in understanding physiological and biochemical functions of a vast number of plant genes by using conventional loss-of-function mutant screen approaches. Gain-of-function mutations created by activation tagging might provide important clues about functions of the activated genes. The identification of PAP1 demonstrates the usefulness of activation tagging for generating massively enriched tissue and plant sources for production of specific natural products and isolating key genes regulating their biosynthetic pathways. Activation tagging has successfully been applied to Arabidopsis as well as to other plant species for cloning genes affecting various biological processes and represents a powerful approach for functional genomics.