Plant & Animal Genomes XVII Conference Plant & Animal Genomes XVII ConferenceJanuary 10-14, 2009
Town & Country Convention Center
San Diego, CA
Nicolas S. Roux , Mathieu Rouard
Banana (Musa spp.) is the fourth most important crop in developing countries. They are important as an export crop but also play a major role in local food security. Crops of Musa are susceptible to an ever increasing range of diseases requiring massive use of pesticides that have dramatic environmental and health impacts and threaten the sustainability of the crop. To harness the potential for genetically-based disease resistance, there is thus an urgent need for a wider diversity of genetically improved banana cultivars. Breeding programs aiming at broadening the genetic basis and providing new resistance genes face many obstacles (e.g. low fertility, structural heterozygosity, polyploidy). The Global Musa Genomics Consortium is an international network of 37 institutions located in 24 countries, working in genomics. It aims for improved understanding of genomic evolution in relation to biotic and abiotic stresses and also to provide meaningful insights for the plant community. Indeed, Musa lies taxonomically within the monocots, although distant from the grass family (graminiaceae), in a position that is important for comparative and evolutionary genomics. Meeting at the Joint Genome Institute (JGI), in January 2008, agricultural researchers, molecular biologists and banana producers agreed on the research strategy, and advocated that sequencing the genome will open the way to finding radically new solutions. Current work has generated an ideal double-haploid line with BAC libraries, more than 10 Mbp of BAC and BAC-end sequence and ESTs. Some data are generated using new sequencing technologies such as 454 and Solexa. More recently, we received the commitment for sequencing, at 4x coverage by the Sanger method from the Agence Nationale de la Recherche (French National Research Agency, ANR). Furthermore some bioinformatics tools are being developed to facilitate future analysis.