Plant & Animal Genomes XVI Conference

January 12-16, 2008
Town & Country Convention Center
San Diego, CA

Genomic Dissection Of Barley Morphology And Developement

Robbie Waugh¹ , Jerome D Franckowiak² , Nicola Bonar¹ , Timothy C Close³ , Arnis Druka¹

¹  Scottish Crop Research Institute, Invergowrie, Dundee DD2 5DA, Scotland

²  Department of Primary Industries and Fisheries, Hermitage Research Station, 604 Yangan Road, Warwick, Queensland 4370, Australia

³  Department of Botany and Plant Sciences, University of California, Riverside, CA 92521-0124, USA

The Bowman series of nearly isogenic lines (NILs) developed by Prof. J. Franckowiak contain almost all of the classically described morphological mutations in barley. The unique feature of the collection is that the original mutated donor plants have all been backcrossed into a single recurrent parent, the cultivar Bowman (generally to > BC5F3). We are applying a 1536-plex SNP genotyping platform developed as part of a transatlantic collaboration (USDA funded Barley CAP and BBSRC / RERAD funded AGOUEB projects) to characterise the introgressed segments containing the mutated alleles in all of the Bowman NILs (~1000). To facilitate rapid forward genetics-based gene isolation, we have also developed a large number of F2 populations in which major classes of mutated alleles are segregating (e.g. in barley spike morphology). We will present an update of the strategy and our initial results.