Plant & Animal Genomes XV Conference

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

Allele Mining Experience On Rice Germplasm Through Advanced M Strategy Using Modified Heuristic Search

Yong-Jin Park

  International Plant Genetic Resources Institute Regional Office for Asia, the Pacific and Oceania, PO Box 236, UPM Post Office, Serdang, 43400, Selangor, MALAYSIA

With much advancement made in the collection of plant genetic resources in genebanks, came the problem of repetitiveness and genetic redundancy from the ever-increasing number in accessions incurring within the existing genepools, hampering efforts for effective management and potential utilization. Core or allele mining sets are thus necessary to ensure that access to useful alleles or characteristics retained in large collections in genebanks is guaranteed. A major challenge that exists is to develop flexible computational tools for the selection of desirable alleles which are seen as an avenue for the rapid expansion and extension of genebank DNA data. The current study has successfully developed a computational tool named the ‘PowerCore’ which aims to support the development of core and allele mining sets by enhancing the high richness and reducing the redundancy of useful alleles. This program implements the advanced M (Maximization) strategy using a modified heuristic algorithm to ensure that all the characteristics for qualitative traits and all the classes for quantitative traits are retained. The advent of program will indeed accelerate the future development of core subsets with all the observed characteristics or classes in large collections and effectively guarantees a reproducible set of entries during the deployment of useful alleles from genebank accessions using various techniques including genomics and bio-informatics tools.