Faculty Member Co-PI on NIH ARRA Grant
Elsbeth Walker (Biology), Sue Roberts (Chemical Engineering), and Jennifer Normanly (Biochemistry and Molecular Biology) have received a two-year NIH ARRA grant of $1,045,201 to establish a Taxol™ consortium that applies molecular biology approaches to characterizing and manipulating *Taxus* metabolism for production of the important anti-cancer drug paclitaxel (Taxol™). The long term goal is to understand the gene networks that plant cells use to produce chemicals that are useful as pharmaceuticals. With this knowledge, they will be able to make drugs that are cheaper, and more environmentally friendly, and more abundantly available. The current project will result in the characterization of genes that play a role in controlling paclitaxel synthesis. We have developed new technology to sort plant cells according to the amount of paclitaxel that they accumulate and the investigators will examine the differences in gene expression in these sorted cell populations. The ability to profile gene expression in a subpopulation of cells is a new approach that will identify genes for which expression is masked in a heterogeneous population of cells. To complete this project, the group will establish new resources for gene discovery in *Taxus*. Currently, only a handful of *Taxus* sequences are publicly available. They will sequence 20,000 'ESTs'-genes that are being expressed in cultures that produce paclitaxel -- to provide an extensive new resource for the plant biotechnology community.
