Finding your knockout: reverse genetics techniques for plants.

The process of finding a mutant plant for your gene of interest has recently become far more straightforward and painless than has ever been possible before. This has come about through the production of large-scale insertional mutagenesis populations. These can now be readily screened in bulk for insertional mutants through a mixture of molecular (PCR/hybridization) and bioinformation techniques. Here we describe a step-by-step guide to the molecular protocols and a description of the bioinformatics approach.