Plant, Animal & Microbe Genomes X Conference

January 12-16, 2002
Town & Country Convention Center
San Diego, CA

Workshop: Functional Genomics
            

MAIZE GENE DISCOVERY, SEQUENCING AND PHENOTYPIC ANALYSIS

¹ Department of Biological Sciences, Stanford University,385 Serra Mall, Stanford CA 94305-5020 USA

The Maize Gene Discovery project is funded by the National Science Foundation; we are a consortium of 10 laboratories (Sarah Hake, Mike Freeling at UC-Berkeley; Vicki L. Chandler, David Galbraith, Brian Larkins at Univ. Arizona; Marty Sachs at Univ. Illinois; Bob Schmidt, Laurie Smith at UC-SD; Volker Brendel at Iowa State University). Our goal is to identify as many maize genes as possible using ESTs (9/01 approx. 108,000) and transposon tagging. RescueMu, a Mu1 element containing pBluescript and other markers, is mobile in transgenic maize. Plasmid rescue is used to recover tagged genes from grids of field-grown maize plants. By sequencing to the right and to the left of RescueMu, we can often identify a known maize gene, a predicted gene from rice or Arabidopsis, or a plant EST. We recently completed GridG sequencing and are analyzing the results to present at this meeting; all of the data has been deposited in the GSS section of GenBank and is annotated onto the EST assembly at ZmDB . This web site also provides numerous analytical programs useful in extracting more information from our sequencing effort. In addition, there is a phenotype database from the evaluation of ear, kernel, seedling, and adult plant characters for a number of the completed grids; novel phenotypes are illustrated with a photograph. Microarrays are printed from the sequenced ESTs; sample images are available at ZmDB. ESTs in consolidated Unigene sets are available to the public as are the microarrays and seeds corresponding to plants in the tagging grids. A permanent seed stock is maintained by the Maize Coop at the Univ. Illinois.