The pea plant was used by Gregor Mendel and Reginal Punnett in the early experimentations in genetics. The sweet pea (pictured) was the model organism used by Punnett Photo: Kathleen Pfefferle/Wikipedia

Researchers in France have developed a high-throughput, forward and reverse genetics tool to examine the genetic reference of the pea.

Scientists from the INRA Plant Genomics Research Unit at Evry and the INRA Grain Legumes Research Unit at Bretenières have developed a genetic reference collection for pea mutants as part of the European Grain Legumes Integrated Project.

Peas are unsuitable for the Agrobacterium tumefacians-based transformation techniques that are commonly used to modify crops. Abdelhafid Bendahmane and colleagues used plants from the early-flowering garden pea cultivar, Caméor, to overcome the problem, creating a mutant population which they then phenotyped for use in both forward and reverse genetics studies.

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The team used a pea TILLING platform with DNA samples from up to 4, 704 plants. TILLING served as an alternative to Agrobacterium-based techniques, using EMS (ethane methyl sulfonate) mutagenesis, along with gene- specific detection of single-nucleotide mutations.

Researchers then created a database called UTILLdb, which records each mutant plant at different developmental stages, as well as incorporating digital images of the plants and holding phenotypic and sequence information on genes.

By Rebecca Debens

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