Plants are masters of weird biochemistry, genomics and possess novel properties that have tremendous value in food, agriculture and the environment. Knowing the sequence of their novel expressed genes has the potential to vastly increase our knowledge and expand applications of plant biology.

We are most interested in 2 kinds of plants for this project:

Plants that produce novel proteins and metabolites (but not drugs, which is another part of the project).  The discovered genes can subsequently be used in genetic engineering and synthetic biology.

Plants with novel properties and behaviors.  The genes novel to fascinating plants that do uncommon things will be excellent teachers

Send me your nominees soon if you don’t see your favorite plant here. Also, we’ll need the actual plant tissue, so send us your weird plants too! We will often refer to these weird plants as extremophytes.

To see a partial list of unique plants that may be good candidates for transcriptome click here.

To see the gas plant, Dictamnus Albus, catch on fire see this youtube video here.