You may not think corn is very complex, but researchers at the Laboratory for Molecular and Computational Genomics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison beg to differ. Dr. David Schwartz, a UW-Madison geneticist, is one of over one hundred authors of an article published Thursday in the journal Science that presents the mapped maize genome, the final product of a four-year, $31 million dollar project.
Maize (corn), introduced to European settlers by Native American hundreds of years ago, is a staple crop of many countries. In addition to being enjoyed as a vegetable or used as animal feed, maize can also be treated to yield high fructose corn syrup, the ubiquitous sweetener, or grain alcohol (ethanol). It is also widely used as a biomass fuel and corn-derived ethanol is an increasingly popular additive to gasoline.
The US-based group of researchers studied B73 and Palomero Toluqueno varieties, important commercial strains of maize. A unique optical mapping facility at the Laboratory for Molecular and Computational Genomics at UW-Madison provided a big-picture view of maize DNA. "Traditional sequencing must work on small chunks at a time, but the maize genome is incredibly complex, full of repeats, and that's confusing. It's like buying a 10,000-piece jigsaw puzzle; from looking at one piece, it's hard to know if you are looking at the dwarf's foot, or Snow White's face. Our optical maps, just like the box cover, give the big picture that allows the sequencers to link up their smaller pieces into a complete genome" says David Schwartz. [UW-Madison News]
“What we have here is a crucial part of the instruction manual for how you breed a better corn plant” says Richard Wilson of the Genome Center at Washington University, St Louis, Missouri. [Nature] This new information will help researchers to design corn plants idealized for different climates across the world, increasing the food supply in impoverished countries.
For more info: To see the full article, please visit the Science website.
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