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| Maize Project Summary
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Maize, commonly called corn, is the most important crop plant in the United States, with 280 million metric tons having been produced in 2005. It is a leading food source for both humans and animals, and it is a primary US export. Maize also is found in many products such as cornstarch, oil products, paper products, solvents, plastic and rubber components, de-icers, and cleaning products to name only a few. Maize has undergone the most intensive and sophisticated breeding and improvement than any other crop in the world. However, there are many more improvements that could be made if the genetic make-up of the 10-chromosome genome were known. For instance, new genes, that are responsible for important traits like yield and drought and aluminum tolerance, can be identified, creating opportunities to bring additional value to farmers around the world. The difficulty is that the genome organization of maize is complex, with in excess of 88% of the DNA consisting of repetitive sequences and only 12% of the DNA encoding genes. Repetitive sequences cause problems, because most computerized genome assembly engines have difficulty determining where a repetitive sequence should be anchored. As Rick Wilson, WUGSC Director explains, "It's going to be like trying to put together a jigsaw puzzle with lots of blue sky (repetitive sequence) and very few pieces with landscape (genes). We'll be working to minimize our data collection on the blue sky and maximize it on the landscape, covering those areas in much greater detail."
The Genome Sequencing Center, in collaboration with Arizona Genomics Institute, Cold Spring Harbor Laboratories, and Iowa State University, has devised a plan that should deliver information regarding the genes present in the genome and possibly some of the regulatory regions. The National Science Foundation, the United States Department of Agriculture, and the Department of Energy are cooperatively funding this project. Displays of the data currently being produced are available in Gramene, a curated open source computer data resource that provides agricultural researchers and plant breeders with biological and genomic information on several grains, including maize. In accord with our policy of making all data publicly available as soon as it is validated, the finished sequences with gene predictions are being submitted to GenBank, a publicly funded repository for sequence data accessible to the public. All indicated and predicted gene models will be improved.
The information garnered through this project will aid maize biologists and breeders in tracking the mixing of genes in genomes that are offspring of 2 differing strains or species (cultivars) that have been crossbred to allow for combination of advantageous traits. Breeders now pollinate one maize species with another, sow the resulting seeds, inspect for desirable traits and do more crossbreeding. Having the genome sequence in hand will allow breeders to use the DNA of the new cross to determine whether it carries the genes for the desired traits. The sequence will also allow maize geneticists to understand more about the evolution of maize in particular, and cereal grasses, in general. |
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