Plant & Animal Genomes XIII Conference

January 15-19, 2005
Town & Country Convention Center
San Diego, CA

Molecular Variation In The Secondary And Distant Primary Oat Gene Pools (Avena spp.)

Eric N Jellen¹ , David E Jarvis¹ , Igor Loskutov² , Jean-Luc Jannink³ , Darren C Ames¹ , F Doug Raymond¹ , P Jeffrey Maughan¹

¹  Brigham Young Univ., Dept. of Plant and Animal Sciences, 275 WIDB, Provo, UT, 84602, U.S.A.

²  N.I. Vavilov Research Institute of Plant Industry, 44, B. Morskaya Street, 190000, St. Petersburg, Russia

³  Iowa State Univ., Dept. of Agronomy, Ames, IA 50010

The common wild oat Avena fatua and its hexaploid relatives are potential sources of genes for improvement of the domesticated oats. However, there is uncertainty about where A. fatua fits in the evolution of hexaploid oats. The present study combines cytogenetic and DNA marker technologies in order to better understand the relationship between A. fatua, its allied floret-shattering taxa A. hybrida and A. occidentalis, and the spikelet-shattering A. sterilis var. ludoviciana and A. insularis. Seventy-seven of these accessions, as well as six accessions from the tetraploid oat A. insularis, 14 accessions of A. sterilis, two accessions of A. byzantina, and three accessions of A. sativa were chosen for the DNA marker study in which genetic variation was measured using 88 amplicons from 17 A. sativa microsatellite primer pairs and six RAPD primers. UPGMA using a Jaccard’s similarity matrix correctly identified the A. insularis outgroup as two of eight total clusters (pruned at 0.38). Avena fatua accessions were distributed among several major clusters but 30/43 (70%) grouped within a single, geographically-diverse cluster (Cluster 8). In contrast, A. sterilis and ssp. ludoviciana showed a slightly greater range of diversity. Cultivated Avena genotypes and A. hybrida mostly grouped within Cluster 8, whereas the majority of A. occidentalis from the Canary Islands clustered with the 59% of A. sterilis in Cluster 4. In conclusion, the marker set was not as informative as hoped, though genetic relationships in Avena have likely been complicated by the circumpolar dispersion of A. fatua as a common cereal weed.