Plant & Animal Genome IX Conference Plant & Animal Genome IX Conference
Workshop: Barley
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In the course of the past decade a comprehensive set of biological, technical, and virtual resources has been established to explore the various facets of the barley genome. In addition to genetic mapping of agronomic traits including resistance to several fungal and viral pathogens and the development of selectable markers, efforts are underway to isolate disease resistance genes by map based cloning. However, chromosome walking towards the gene of interest is greatly impaired by the large content of repetitive DNAs. Therefore, the large scale generation of expressed sequence tags (ESTs) represents an alternative approach to capture a significant portion of the gene repertoire of barley, independently of the complexity of its genome. To date, more than 13,000 barley ESTs have been generated and deposited in a database (http://pgrc.ipk-gatersleben.de/). The corresponding cDNA clones are presently being deployed to extend the genetic map and to initiate the construction of a physical map. Based on the homology to mapped rice ESTs and the marker synteny present between the two genomes electronic mapping of barley EST sequences can be performed thus facilitating the saturation of a target region in barley with cDNA markers. Moreover, the cDNA clones emerging from the EST program represent a resource for the multiparallel analysis of gene expression (DNA-chip) which is expected to provide valuable information on gene function.