Researchers from the US and Germany, including two HudsonAlpha faculty investigators, delve into the roots of gene body methylation in plants in a PNAS article published online July 26, GenomeWeb reports. While most of the plants it analyzed by comparative epigenomics had methylomes resembling Arabidopsis thaliana, the team unearthed a plant lacking gene body methylation: a plant in the Brassicaceae family called Eutrema salsugineum, commonly known as saltwater cress.
HudsonAlpha faculty investigators Jane Grimwood, PhD, and Jeremy Schmutz, who together co-direct the Genome Sequencing Center at HudsonAlpha Institute for Biotechnology, worked on the original Eutrema genome as part of a Joint Genome Institute Community Science Program. The project is part of a larger study on methylation across plants that HudsonAlpha researchers worked on in collaboration with University of Georgia assistant professor Bob Schmitz, PhD.