UC Davis Gets US$ 6.8 M to Map Wheat Genome

The U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) has awarded University of California Davis a three-year $6.8 million grant for a plant genome project that could speed up the development of wheat varieties with improved grain quality and nutrition, higher yield, resistance to pests and diseases, and tolerance to adverse climatic conditions. The project received the largest award from the NSF Plant Genome Program this year.

Jan Dvorak and colleagues seeks to construct a physical map of one of the three genomes making up the chromosome complement of wheat, a mammoth task considering the size of the plant’s genome. Each of the three wheat genomes, for instance, is larger than the genome of rice. Physical maps represent the location of genes and other landmarks along a chromosome. Scientists use landmarks known as sequence-tagged site (STS) to help them find their way around the genome. STS are stretches of DNA, usually a few hundred basepairs long, which is found in only one place in the genome.

“Instead of producing a physical map of wheat chromosomes directly, the chromosomes of Aegilops tauschii, one of the three ancestors of wheat and the source of its D genome, will be mapped first,” Dvorak said. “These maps will then be used as templates in physical mapping of individual chromosomes of the wheat D genome, which is one of the specific objectives of this project.”

Read more at http://www.news.ucdavis.edu/search/news_detail.lasso?id=8902