Plant & Animal Genome IX Conference Plant & Animal Genome IX Conference
Poster: Sequencing & EST
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The second phase of the Rice Genome Research Program (RGP) launched in 1998 with the aim of decoding all the information on inheritance of rice as a part of the International Rice Genome Sequencing Project (IRGSP). At a moment, RGP's major goal is to complete the sequence of chromosomes 1(52Mb) and 6(36Mb). Currently, we have finished the sequencing of 94 ordered PAC (P1-derived artificial chromosome) / BAC (bacterial artificial chromosome) clones and submitted about 13 Mb of completed sequence data to the DNA Data Bank of Japan (DDBJ). In the course of our sequencing analysis, we found many repeated sequences in rice genome, which often cause misassembling in shotgun sequencing. The prevalence of GC-rich regions also represents an obstacle in the finishing stage of sequencing. However, most of these GC-rich regions correspond to the predicted exon region. To read-through these repeats and GC-rich regions and maintain the accuracy level of our sequence data to less than one error in 10,000 nucleotides (99.99%), we use several strategies such as different chemistry, sub-cloning and/or primer walking. The results of our sequencing efforts to solve these difficulties will be described together with the recent progress in sequencing of chromosomes 1 and 6. This work is supported by a MAFF Rice Genome Project grant GS-1201.