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What is about leaf senescence and LSD?
Leaf senescence has been recognized as the last phase of plant development, a highly ordered process regulated by genes called SAGs. Premature senescence leads to the reduced yield of crops and this is likely to be of increasing concern in the time of climate changing and population growth. Therefore, it might be expected that more researches will focus on this important topic in the future, because increased understanding of the senescence process can help people improve the yield of crops. At present, many researches about leaf senescence have been done in Arabidopsis thaliana, however, how the leaf senescence process is initiated and regulated remains largely unknown, especially for other species. Luckily, with the rapid development of sequencing technology, more and more plant genomes have been sequenced, which offers us a great opportunity to analyze the homologous genes of Arabidopsis thaliana SAGs in other species.
By integrating the data from mutant studies and transgenic analysis, we collected many SAGs related to regulation of the leaf senescence in various species, as is shown in Species Tree. This database can facilitate studies in the leaf senescence community.
Another characteristics of this database is that we have categorized SAGs according to their functions in regulation of leaf senescence and used standard criteria to describe senescence associated phenotypes for mutants.
Who is responsible for LSD?
LSD is managed by researchers at the National Genomics Data Center in Beijing Institute of Genomics, Chinese Academy of Sciences, and researchers at Beijing Forestry University, China.
- Zhonghai Li, an principal investigator at Beijing Forestry University, is taking the charge of current database as well as data mining of the database.
- Yang Zhang, a graduate student at the National Genomics Data Center in Beijing Institute of Genomics, Chinese Academy of Sciences, is responsible for updating current database.
- Yi Zhao, a graduate student in Jingchu Luo's group at the CBI, Peking University, is responsible for updating current database.
- Dong Zou, system administrator at the National Genomics Data Center in Beijing Institute of Genomics, Chinese Academy of Sciences, is responsible for updating current database.
- Houling Wang, a postdoc researcher in Zhonghai Li's group at Beijing Forestry University, helped with information updating of LSD.
- Yi Zhang, a postdoc researcher in Zhonghai Li's group at Beijing Forestry University, helped with information updating of LSD.
- Prof. Hongwei Guo, Dr Zhang Zhang and Prof. Jingchu Luo supervised the development and update of LSD.
What is about the group of Zhonghai Li & Hongwei Guo in Beijing Forestry University?
Since 2006, Zhonghai Li had studied the regulatory mechanisms of leaf senescence by using the model plant Arabidopsis in Prof. Hongwei Guo’s group in Peking University. Their findings provided novel insights to the regulatory mechanism of the plant hormones ethylene, JA and SA in leaf senescence. A gene regulatory network of leaf senescence was constructed, and the possible explanations for the genetic redundancy of senescence-associated transcription factors in Arabidopsis was provided. To systemically study leaf senescence, by collaboration with Dr. Xiaochuan Liu and Dr. Yi Zhao, two Ph.D. students of Prof. Jingchu Luo, Peking University, they developed the Leaf Senescence Database (LSD) and updated to LSD2.0, providing a useful resource for researchers in plant science.
At March 2018, Dr. Zhonghai Li joined in the Beijing Advanced Innovation Center for Tree Breeding by Molecular Design (BAICFTBMD), Beijing Forestry University（BJFU), and established a research group by cooperation with Prof. Hongwei Guo. The research interesting of this group was to reveal the molecular mechanisms of ethylene signal pathway in regulating leaf senescence, and dissect the signal pathway of leaf senescence in Arabidopsis and in Poplar. In the near future, the novel findings in Poplar leaf senescence will be used to develop the transgenic Poplar trees with increased biomass and enhanced tolerance to stresses such as drought.
What is about the National Genomics Data Center?
The National Genomics Data Center(NGDC) ( https://bigd.big.ac.cn) at Beijing Institute of Genomics (BIG) of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) provides open access to a suite of database resources, with the aim to support research activities for domestic and international users in both academia and industry to translate big data into big discoveries. With the vast amounts of multi-omics data generated at unprecedented scales and rates, the National Genomics Data Center is continually expanding, updating and enriching its core database resources through big data integration and value-added curation.
Specially, BIG features important achievements in not only actively participating in the International Human Genome Project China Part but also presiding several prestigious national research projects (e.g. the Chinese Superhybrid Rice Genome Project, the Chicken, Silkworm, Date Palm, Common Carp, Cassava and Rubber Tree Genome Projects), pioneers the Chinese Population Precision Medicine Initiative and possesses rich experiences in developing and maintaining biological databases. In addition, it is well equipped with facilities including both DNA sequencers and high performance computing resources. Therefore, the National Genomics Data Center is dedicated to constructing and maintaining biological databases by big data integration and value-added curation, performing basic research by development of advanced methods to aid translation of big data into big discovery and providing freely open access to a suite of featured data resources in support of worldwide activities in both academia and industry.
