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| Consortium for Maize Genomics |
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About MGC
Maize is both a classical genetic model for plant research and an economically important crop. Sequencing
the maize genome will greatly influence our understanding of the molecular basis of important agronomic
traits, gene regulation, genome evolution, plant development and biology. However, the large size of the
maize genome and the expectation that upwards of 80% of the genome is represented by repetitive elements
has prompted the examination of sequencing technologies expected to target gene rich regions as an
alternative to whole genome sequencing.
The Consortium for Maize Genomics, consisting of The Donald Danforth Plant
Science Center, The Institute for Genomic Research (TIGR),
Purdue University and Orion
Genomics, has been awarded an NSF funded plant genome grant to develop and evaluate high-throughput and robust
strategies to isolate and sequence maize genes. Two strategies which have been proposed to enrich for gene
rich regions are methyl-filtration and
high-Cot selection.
Methyl-filtration, a technique licensed to Orion
Genomics, exploits the finding that the majority of retrotransposon and repetitive sequences in maize
are methylated.
High Cot selected libraries produced by Jeff Bennetzen at Purdue University exploit the relatively low abundance of the gene
sequences, which are present in small number of copies in the genome. The Maize Genomics Consortium
will produce up to 500,000 sequence reads from each of these promising methods, analyze the sequence
collection and disseminate all data into the public domain. Concurrent with this effort is another
NSF funded plant
genome grant awarded to Jo Messing at Rutgers University, and Rod Wing and Cari Soderlund at the Arizona Genome Institute. Part of our analysis will
focus on comparing our genome data with the whole maize BAC sequence that the Messing group will produce.
We anticipate that this analysis will aid in identifying the best strategy for delivering a comprehensive
genome resource to the scientific community.
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For general information about maize genome sequencing projects, also visit
maizegenome.org.
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