Plant & Animal Genomes XIV Conference Plant & Animal Genomes XIV ConferenceJanuary 14-18, 2006
Town & Country Convention Center
San Diego, CA
Establishing high quality physical maps of crop plants is a key objective in plant science, as these maps provide an entry point to the genome for isolating genes underlying QTLs or mendelian traits and for understanding and manipulating the genome in breeding. Establishing a physical map of bread wheat, one of the most important crops world-wide, is a major challenge due to the enormous size of the genome and its hexaploid composition. We aim to contribute to the international effort to make BAC-based physical maps of Chinese Spring by an indirect route that we consider to have substantial merit. This involves making a BAC-based physical map of Brachypodium distachyon, a close relative of wheat and barley that has a rice-sized genome. The close relationship of Brachypodium to wheat leads to their genes sharing high similarity that generate unambiguous hybridisation signals when used on wheat BAC filters and southern blots. Trial experiments show it is feasible to anchor Brachypodium BACs to the rice genome by BAC End Sequence (BES) to create an outline physical map, and progress in this will be reported. We aim to establish an outline physical map of Brachypodium distachyon Bd3-1 using BES and fingerprinting and to use this to start assembling contigs in wheat chromosome groups. Furthermore we plan to obtain a complete genome sequence in the mid term to develop the potential of Bd3-1 as an experimental organism and to help identify and analyse genes in the repeat-ridden wheat genome.