Everything you always wanted to know about transcriptomics

Eric van der Graaff (Graz): The study of gene expression can reveal much insight into the function of a respective gene in plant growth and stress responses. Originally such studies were performed with techniques analysing the expression for single genes only. The technical development of microarrays, containing a large number of gene specific probes, allowed studies addressing full genome expression analysis. Such transcriptomics approaches required the development of appropriate bio-informatics tools enabling the data-mining to interpret the huge amount of obtained data and subsequently extract the required information. Based on several projects I performed over the last 13 years, different types of transcriptomics studies and the power of these to identify novel genes of interest will be presented.