TobEA: an atlas of tobacco gene expression from seed to senescence.

Background: Transcriptomics has resulted in the development of large data sets and tools for the progression of functional genomics and systems biology in many model organisms. Currently there is no commercially available microarray to allow such expression studies in Nicotiana tabacum (tobacco).

Results: A custom designed Affymetrix tobacco expression microarray was generated from a set of over 40k unigenes and used to measure gene expression in 19 different tobacco samples to produce the Tobacco Expression Atlas (TobEA).