Plant & Animal Genomes XV Conference

January 13-17, 2007
Town & Country Convention Center
San Diego, CA

High-Resolution Comparative Rh Maps For Ovine Chromosomes 1, 9 And 20

Chunhua Wu¹ , Tracy S. Hadfield¹ , Koh Nomura¹ , Brian Dalrymple² , James W. Kijas² , James E. Womack³ , Tom Goldammer⁴ , John L. Williams⁵ , Noelle E. Cockett¹

¹  Department of Animal, Dairy, and Veterinary Sciences, Utah State University, Logan, UT USA

²  CSIRO Livestock Industries, St Lucia, Brisbane, QLD 4067, Australia

³  Department of Veterinary Pathobiology, Texas A&M University, College Station, TX USA

⁴  Department of Molecular Biology, Research Institute for the Biology of Farm Animals, Dummerstorf, Germany

⁵  Division of Molecular Biology, Roslin Institute, Roslin - Midlothian EH25 9PS, UK

A recently developed ovine whole genome radiation hybrid panel (USUoRH5000) is now being used to construct RH maps for sheep chromosomes. In the present study, primers typed across the panel were designed from expressed-sequence tags (EST) and BAC-end sequences (BES) that had predicted locations on ovine chromosomes (OAR) 1, 9 and 20 based on human and bovine comparative maps. The BES were selected to span 1 Mb intervals predicted from the Sheep Genome Browser V1.1 scaffold. Primers for microsatellites assigned to positions on the ovine linkage map were also typed on the ovine RH panel. The resulting data have been combined to produce preliminary maps for OAR1, 9 and 20. The final maps will contain around 750 loci, with up to 120 microsatellites and 630 ESTs/genes and BES. These high resolution maps will provide a connection between the emerging ovine BAC physical map and the existing ovine linkage map. Connections to the high resolution bovine and human genome maps will allow predictions of chromosomal synteny across species. The resulting integrated, whole genome map will make a significant contribution to the identification of economically important traits in sheep.