The plant glycosyltransferase clone collection for functional genomics

Summary The glycosyltransferases ( GT s) are an important and functionally diverse family of enzymes involved in glycan and glycoside biosynthesis. Plants have evolved large families of GT s which undertake the array of glycosylation reactions that occur during plant development and growth. Based on the Carbohydrate‐Active enZymes ( CAZ y) database, the genome of the reference plant Arabidopsis thaliana codes for over 450 GTs, while the rice genome ( O ryza sativa ) contains over 600 members. Collectively, GT s from these reference plants can be classified into over 40 distinct GT families. Although these enzymes are involved in many important plant specific processes such as cell‐wall and secondary metabolite biosynthesis, few have been functionally characterized. We have sought to develop a plant GT s clone resource that will enable functional genomic approaches to be undertaken by the plant research community. In total, 403 (88%) of CAZ y defined Arabidopsis GT s have been cloned, while 96 (15%) of the GT s coded by rice have been cloned. The collection resulted in the update of a number of Arabidopsis GT gene models. The clones represent full‐length coding sequences without termination codons and are Gateway ® compatible. To demonstrate the utility of this JBEI GT Collection, a set of efficient particle bombardment plasmids (p B ullet) was also constructed with markers for the endomembrane. The utility of the p B ullet collection was demonstrated by localizing all members of the Arabidopsis GT 14 family to the Golgi apparatus or the endoplasmic reticulum ( ER ). Updates to these resources are available at the JBEI GT Collection website http://www.addgene.org/ .