BEIJING, Feb. 25 (Xinhua) -- Researchers have constructed a database of plant duplicate genes freely available online.

Plants are capable of duplicating their genes. Gene duplication with high frequency makes genetic variation happen continuously and helps plants adopt to the external changeable environment.

To provide a platform for accessing duplicated gene pairs in different plants, the Chinese and American researchers surveyed 141 sequenced plant genomes to elucidate consequences of gene and genome duplication, and constructed the Plant Duplicate Gene Database.

They collected plant genomes in large scale. And the database covers the gene information of food crops like soybeans, rice, wheat, and corn, as well as gardening crops like pear, peach, grape, vegetable, and flowers.

The database is expected to provide foundation for further investigation of the dynamic evolution of duplicate genes, according to the study published on journal Genome Biology.

The researchers also developed a bio-informatics method to identify different modes of gene duplication in plants. Enditem