Functional analysis of sugarcane promoters and their allelic variation

Abstract

Sugarcane is a C4 grass used for centuries as the main source of sugar and, more recently, for bioethanol production. Due to its great importance on world's economic scenario, studies on sugarcane are important to produce knowledge that might lead to increase in yield to supply both internal and external demand. Sugarcane genomics is way behind compared to the knowledge of other crops, such as sorghum, maize and rice. The beginning of the studies took place with SUCEST project and continues expanding itself on the activities of SUCEST-FUN project and the ongoing sugarcane genome sequencing. However, as already known for other species, genome sequencing will only solve part of a bigger problem and will be necessary start to unravel complex sugarcane regulatory networks, providing data from regulatory pathways and the consequences on their perturbations. This present project falls in this context and aims to analyze data from the sugarcane genome sequencing project to establish the architecture of regulatory networks as well as identify regulatory regions on sugarcane genome. (AU)