Plant & Animal Genome VI Conference

W65

MAIZE GENOME ANALYSIS, STRATEGIES AND EARLY RESULTS

1. Lita Annenberg Hazen Genome Center, Cold Spring Harbor Lab, P.O. Box 100, Cold Spring Harbor, NY, 11724
2. Plant Biology Group, Cold Spring Harbor Lab, P.O. Box 100, Cold Spring Harbor, NY, 11724

There is mounting evidence for some level of locally conserved gene order between Arabidopsis and the cereal grains such as maize. Therefore, initiation of the complete sequencing of the Arabidopsis genome should greatly facilitate positional cloning of a large number of genes in maize and other grains. A major limitation to understanding this relationship is the number of publicly available maize sequences to use as framework markers to facilitate maize mapping. We are sequencing a number of such markers that are a combination maize mapping probes and expressed sequence tags. Moreover, the presence of a large number of maize ESTs in the public databases will benefit many other aspects of maize research such as identifying potential homologs of genes characterized in other species. All of the sequences we are generating are being made immediately available to the public over the World Wide Web (http://clio.cshl.org/genseq/) Combined with the ongoing sequencing of the Arabidopsis genome, these data will provide many of the benefits of maize genome analysis at a fraction of the cost of a full scale sequencing effort.