Populus Resources and Bioinformatics

Abstract

As a model system, Populus offers the opportunity to study biological questions pertinent to perennial growth habits such as lignocellulosic cell wall biogenesis and dormancy cycles. In the past years, much has been learnt about the transcriptional control of such processes and there is an ever-growing resource of publicly available transcriptomics data and EST sequences available. More recently greater emphasis has been placed on the study of metabolomic data and particularly in linking metabolic changes to both development and ecosystem functioning. Populus represents an ideal model system in which genetic and genomic studies can be conducted in a ecological key-stone species as well in a commercially important forest tree crop. To facilitate biological understanding a number of bioinformatics resources have become available for Populus alongside greater integration of the species in centralized sequence data sources such as NCBI and Interpro. These developments are rapidly advancing the ability to use Populus as a model system for the study of developmental, ecological and comparative genomics questions. Here we overview the current state of bioinformatics resources available for studies involving Populus as well as detailing the genetic material available to conduct studies on.