Plant & Animal Genomes XIII Conference

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

Identifying And Characterizing Regions Of Synteny Between Lettuce, Sunflower And Arabidopsis

Lee Timms¹ , Leah McHale² , Alex Kozik² , Rosmery Soris¹ , Mike Chase¹ , Patricia Szczys¹ , Rick V Kesseli¹

¹  Biology Department, University of Massachusetts, 100 Morrissey Blvd, Boston, MA, 02125, USA

²  Department of Vegetable Crops, University of California, Davis, CA, 95616, USA

We have used several approaches to examine the extent of synteny between members of the Composite family and Arabidopsis thaliana. The first, global, approach uses all available markers in lettuce and sunflower mapping populations and identifies physical locations of homologs in Arabidopsis and parallel patterns of linkage among genes. In the second local approach, we have chosen several specific regions of the Arabidopsis genome, and identified all homologs in the Composite Genome database. We search for single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) present and then map these markers in our basic mapping populations. The results have been mixed with some patterns and regions suggesting syntenic relationships and others suggesting extensive genome rearrangements. Implications of this work are discussed.