Application of transposons in the plant functional genomics

Transposons have been used extensively for insertional mutagenesis of endogenous or heterologous plants for gene isolation and gene cloning. With the rapid development of genome research in several plants, more gene sequences with unknown function should be identified by the reverse genetics. Large scale trasposon mutagenes has become the important approach for the functional genomics. This review focuses on the transposons widely used and how it was successfully used in heterologous plants for insertional mutagenesis and as a tool of reverse genetics in the functional genomics study.