Plant & Animal Genomes XVII Conference

January 10-14, 2009
Town & Country Convention Center
San Diego, CA

Analysis Of Genome Structure And Organization In Banana (Musa acuminata) Using 454 Sequencing

Eva Hribova¹ , Pavel Neumann² , Jiri Macas² , Jaroslav Dolezel^{1, 3}

¹  Laboratory of Molecular Cytogenetics and Cytometry, Institute of Experimental Botany, Sokolovska 6, CZ-77200 Olomouc, Czech Republic

²  Biology Centre ASCR, Institute of Plant Molecular Biology, Laboratory of Molecular Cytogenetics, Branisovska 31/1160, CZ-370 05 Ceske Budejovice, Czech Republic

³  Department of Cell Biology and Genetics, Palacky University, Slechtitelu 11, CZ-78371 Olomouc, Czech Republic

Bananas and plantains (Musa spp.) are crops with enormous socio-economic importance. Most of edible cultivars are parthenocarpic seed sterile vegetatively propagated diploid and polyploid forms of M. acuminata (A genome) and hybrids that originated from crosses between M. acuminata and M. balbisiana (B genome). Although both specie are characterized by relatively small nuclear genomes (1C = 550 - 650 Mbp), the knowledge on genome organization and evolution remains poor. In this work, we used massively parallel 454 sequencing technology to characterize repetitive DNA sequences in M. acuminata ‘Calcutta 4’ (1C = 620 Mbp). One 454 sequencing reaction on the FLX system resulted in 477,699 reads with average length of 206 nucleotides. Until now, this is the largest amount of genomic sequence data available for Musa, representing about 15% of the ‘Calcutta 4’ genome. Various types of mobile elements and new tandem organized repeats were classified and characterized for copy number and genomic distribution. Cytogenetic localization of new tandem repeats on mitotic chromosomes revealed clustering of the repeats in a sub-telomeric region of one chromosome pair. Moreover, we studied genomic organization of the new tandem repeats in relatives of M. acuminata. The 454 sequence data obtained in this work should facilitate annotation of nucleotide sequences during the ongoing banana genome sequencing project. This work has been supported by the Grant Agency of the Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic (Contract No. IAA600380703) and the International Atomic Energy Agency (Contract No. 12230).