Plant & Animal Genome VII Conference

P494

SEQUENCING THE ARABIDOPSIS GENOME

¹Plant Gene Expression Center, USDA/UC Berkeley, 800 Buchanan St, Albany, CA 94710 USA

²Stanford DNA Sequencing and Technology Center, 855 California Ave, Stanford, CA 94304 USA

³Plant Sciences Institute, Dept of Biology, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA 19104 USA

We are mapping and sequencing the genome of the plant Arabidopsis thaliana. To achieve this goal, the SPP Consortium was formed between the Standford Genome Sequencing and Technology Center, the University of Pennsylvania, and the Plant Gene Expression Center/USDA-UC Berkeley. The focus of our efforts is centered on chromosome 1, the largest (ca. 30Mb) of the five Arabidopsis chromosomes. Over 5000 BACs for chromosome 1 have been identified using the TAMU and IGF BAC libraries (>23000 clones; average insert size 100kb, 15-fold coverage of the Arabidopsis genome). Our sequencing efforts have been focused on non-chimeric chromosome 1 BAC clones. Large insert size M13 shotgun libraries have been constructed with BAC DNAs, and show a minimum of E. coli DNA contamination. We are using instrumentation developed at the Stanford Genome Center to automate the sequencing process. With such technology, we are currently sequencing overlapping and non-overlapping BAC clones along chromosome 1 at 10x coverage using Dye Primer and Dye Terminator chemistries. Our sequencing capacity allow us to produce 1Mb of finished and annotated sequence per month.