Plant & Animal Genomes XI Conference

January 11-15, 2003
Town & Country Convention Center
San Diego, CA

Workshop: Citrus
            

CITRUS GENOMICS AT THE UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, RIVERSIDE

Department of Botany and Plant Sciences, University of California, Riverside, CA 92521, USA

Several citrus genomics projects at the University of California, Riverside will be summarized. In the Roose lab, projects include marker (RFLP, RAPD, SSR) maps of a Sacaton citrumelo x Troyer citrange population, AFLP maps of a pummelo x trifoliate population, and plans to map SSRs and ESTs in a Fortune x Fairchild mandarin cross and in the Sacaton x Troyer population. Field trials to collect data on scion and rootstock performance traits in these populations are planned. Joe Kepiro has mapped a major gene for nucellar embryony in trifoliate orange and a second gene that influences the proportion of polyembyonic seeds. To investigate genetic diversity, Noelle Anglin has genotyped about 400 accessions from the UCR/USDA germplasm collection for 23 SSR markers. We are developing additional SSR markers - about 1000 clones from enriched libraries have been sequenced by Jose Chaparro (USDA-HRL) and primer sets for about 30 additional SSR marker loci have been developed. In collaboration with Erik Mirkov (Texas A&M), we have sequenced and analyzed 282 kb surrounding the Ctv locus. This region includes seven genes similar to CC-NBS-LRR disease resistance genes and several different types of transposable element sequences. Linda Walling and Virginia Alonzo have a project on seed ablation that includes sequencing cDNAs from a library enriched for genes expressed in young developing seeds. Carol Lovatt, Linda Walling and Lynn Pillitteri have isolated several citrus floral genes. Planned projects include sequencing and mapping ESTs and development of a citrus EST database (HarvEST: Citrus) (Roose and Close).