Mining Gems in Literature and Genomes: A Proof of Concept in Artemisia tridentata

Increasing temperatures and aridity negatively affect plant communities, including the recruitment of foundational species like sagebrush (Artemisia tridentata). While research on the genomic basis of plant resilience towards drought has been conducted in crops and model plants, fewer studies have evaluated natural plant communities. We provide a resource for identifying genes underpinning drought across a broad range of plants using a literature mining approach with the newly developed package G2PMineR. Using our initial gene pool query, we refined the pipeline and manually vetted the top 50 candidate genes/gene families for relatedness to plant stress drought response and categorized based on ontologies. Selecting the exemplar gene DREB- which had the highest occurrence in the literature mining process- we provide a proof of concept by mining the Artemisia tridentata genome using known DREB DNA sequences from NCBI GenBank. Limited scaffold matches were discovered in two species of legumes, but not in the model plant species Arabidopsis thaliana. Our research will be used to construct networks for genome to phenome research, with applicability to assessing adaptive capacity of natural plant communities towards drought by analyzing gene sequences in the Artemisia tridentata genome. We anticipate this research will inform future restoration efforts for sagebrush and other plant species by ensuring individuals have the adaptive capacity to endure future drought conditions.