Plant & Animal Genomes XIII Conference

January 15-19, 2005
Town & Country Convention Center
San Diego, CA

Bacterial Artificial Chromosome-Based Physical Map Of Gibberella zeae (Fusarium graminearum)

Yueh-Long Chang^{1, 2} , Seungho Cho¹ , Corby Kistler³ , Hsieh-Chun Sheng ² , Gary J Muehlbauer¹

¹  Department of Agronomy and Plant Genetics, University of Minnesota, St. Paul, MN 55108

²  Institute of Agricultural Biotechnology, National Chiayi University, Chiayi, Taiwan 600

³  USDA-ARS, Cereal Disease Laboratory, Department of Plant Pathology, University of Minnesota, St. Paul, MN 55108

Fusarium head blight, caused by Fusarium graminearum, is a major disease problem in the small grain crops wheat and barley. We developed a BAC-based physical map of F. graminearum integrated with the genome sequence and genetic map. We fingerprinted 4,224 BAC clones from two complementary genomic libraries with the average insert sizes of 107 and 95 kb for an estimated 11-fold coverage of the genome. Fingerprint data was used to develop a physical map of F. graminearum consisting of 112 contigs with a total coverage of 43.2 Mb in length. Using lower stringency of analysis parameters for further mergence of the contigs, the preliminary 112 contigs were assembled into 26 contigs covering 36.4 Mb in length. For confirming the reliability of this physical map, we compared our map to the genome sequence posted on the Fusarium database website (http://www.broad.mit.edu/cgi-bin/annotation/fusarium). The comparison shows that the size of our physical map is equivalent to the 36 Mb genome sequence and that only three of the contigs are not consistent with the sequence contigs. We used 30 sequence-based genetic markers, randomly spaced throughout the genome, to integrate the physical map with the genetic map. Based on intensive comparisons of our physical map with the genome sequence and genetic map, our new integrated map has proved to be highly reliable. In the future, the map can provide an excellent resource for studies of gene cloning, comparative mapping, and genome organization.