Plant & Animal Genomes XI Conference

January 11-15, 2003
Town & Country Convention Center
San Diego, CA

Poster: Large Insert Libraries
            

A NEW BAC LIBRARY FOR PEA APHID: AN IMPORTANT GENOMIC TOOL FOR THE STUDY OF POLYPHENISM

¹ Clemson University Genomics Institute, Room 100 Jordan Hall, Clemson, SC 29634

² M166 Guyot Hall, Dept. Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Princeton University, Princeton, NJ

The pea aphid has become a model genetic system for the study of polyphenisms, the production of dramatically divergent phenotypes among genetically identical clones. In order to study the genes contributing to to polyphenism, and to devleop a framework for the pea aphid genome, we have constructed a high-quality pea ahid BAC library. The library contains 18,432 clones stored in 48 384-well microtiter plates. A random sampling of 384 BACs indicated an average insert size of 120 kb. Library coverage is estimated to be about 7 haploid genome equivalents. Screening the BAC library colony filters with sequences associated with six different loci involved in insect growth and development produced anywhere from one to 32 hits per probe. A number of probes identified gene families (eg Hox complex) and thus gave a large amount of hits. The pea aphid BAC library will be publicaly available and filters and clones can be orderd from the CUGI BAC/EST Resource center web site (http://www.genome.clemson.edu).