Drought, heat waves and fire have become more prevalent in northwestern North America threatening the sustainability of sagebrush (Artemisia tridentate) populations. This project aims to understand and predict pathways related to drought tolerance across sagebrush populations by identifying genes related to stomatal anatomy. Stomata control gas exchange, regulate transpiration, and enable photosynthesis becoming essential to estimate water use efficiency (WUE) in face of climate change.

While the sagebrush genome has been recently published, it is not fully annotated, and genes related to stomatal anatomy have not been identified. The annotated genome of the model Arabidopsis thaliana is mined to identify genes underpinning stomatal anatomy and recover those in sagebrush. An automated literature review pipeline was designed and implemented to identify genes related to our target phenotype in Arabidopsis thaliana. The pipeline is seeded with a list of key genes and mines for additional genes, for which their function has been confirmed by publications deposited in the NCBI database. Those latter publications are checked to evaluate whether they connect to new genes involved in this phenotype. This resource is currently used to identify genes controlling stomatal anatomy in sagebrush and perform comparative analyses across populations to predict differences in WUE.