BIOINFORMATICS STRATEGIES FOR GENOMICS: EXAMPLES AND APPROACHES FOR TOMATO

My PhD is funded by the Solanaceae Pollen thermotolerance – Initial Training Network (SPOT-ITN) in the frame of the European Marie Curie Actions. The consortium aims to investigate fundamental and applied aspects contributing to the protection of pollen at increased environmental temperatures, deciphering the underlying of pollen development and its response to heat stress, starting from analyses on Tomato. Obviously, the findings are supposed to be a guideline, and the procedures to be applicable to other plants in the future. In the light of the SPOT-ITN project objectives, and to provide a comprehensive bioinformatics infrastructure to support extensive genomics analyses in tomato, we collected, processed and integrated different resources; and organized them into dedicated databases with appropriate query user interfaces. This bioinformatics effort required the design of the most adequate software to reconcile the manifold resources from different cell information levels (genomics, transcriptomics, epigenomics). This is fundamental for data integration and analysis. The development of appropriate tools to mine the data from the “omics” approaches employed to trace the pollen development and the heat stress response has also been necessary to the project. In this thesis, the main efforts undertaken and the analyses conducted on the basis of such resources with the strategies and approaches developed are reported in details.