The Joint BioEnergy Institute (JBEI) was established in 2007 to research the production of advanced biofuels from ligno-cellulosic material as part of the Bioenergy Research Center program by the Office of Science at the Department of Energy.

To accelerate both the manipulation and our understanding of ligno-cellulosic material, JBEI sought to create a collection of all glycosyltransferases (GTs) from the reference plants Arabidopsis (dicot) and rice (monocot). Plants contain large families of glycosyltransferases, the majority of which have no known function. Glycosyltransferases catalyze the transfer of sugar moieties within the plant cell and multiple GT gene families are directly responsible for the production of ligno-cellulosic material. This material or biomass will provide the feedstock for the development of advanced biofuels.

In 2014 the Heazlewood lab moved from JBEI to the School of BioSciences at The University of Melbourne. The collections are still being finalized in collaboartion with the Bacic group at The University of Melbourne.

Lao J, Oikawa A, Bromley JR, McInerney P, Suttangkakul A, Smith-Moritz AM, Plahar H, Chiu T-Y, González Fernández-Niño SM, Ebert B, Yang F, Christiansen KM, Hansen SF, Stonebloom S, Adams PD, Ronald PC, Hillson NJ, Hadi MZ, Vega-Sanchez ME, Loqué D, Scheller HV, Heazlewood JL (2014) The plant glycosyltransferase clone collection for functional genomics. The Plant Journal 79: 517-529. PubMed

GT Clone Collections

The entire Arabidopsis GT collection will be available from the Arabidopsis stock centers (e.g. ABRC and NASC).

Individual clones can be requested, please use the corresponding JBEI Part ID (e.g. JPUB_001848) available for each clone at the at the Inventory for Composable Elements (ICE).

The rice GT collection is currently only available as individual clones directly through JBEI upon request. Please use the corresponding JBEI Part ID (e.g. JPUB_001848) available for each clone at the Inventory for Composable Elements (ICE).

pBullet plasmids

The pBullet plasmid collection will be made available through the stock centers (e.g. ABRC and NASC) and also through Addgene.

We are happy to take submissions of cDNA for any plant GTs, especially missing Arabidopsis and rice clones, to complete these collections. Many of the missing clones could not be readily amplified and as such cDNA templates with STOPS and non-Gateway vectors would still be useful. Please use the email below to contact us prior to sending clones.

For clone availability, ordering and submissions, please contact the following people:

Joshua Heazlewood (The University of Melbourne)