This project will use genomics technologies in a comparative context to harness the information present in the diversity of species to fill in the gaps in our understanding of model and crop plants. We will focus on a fundamental, economically important and experimentally tractable biological system, plant reproduction, and use genomic and post-genomic tools to model and manipulate the regulatory network at the centre of the reproductive process. Using a comparative approach, we aim to understand how evolutionary variation in non-coding DNA regions has led to variation in reproductive processes in (crop) species. To derive maximum benefit from a broad comparative analysis, we will focus on a key set of genetic interactions characterised in depth in the reference species, Arabidopsis. Our final aim of this project is to achieve an understanding of the cis-regulatory elements controlling reproduction in plants, to understand the evolutionary variation in this network and to benefit from this information to predictably manipulate the system.