Search

Summary Barley (Hordeum vulgare L.) possesses a large and highly repetitive genome of 5.1 Gb that has hindered the development of a complete sequence. In 2012, the International Barley Sequencing Consortium released a resource integrating whole‐genome shotgun sequences with a physical and genetic framework. However, because only 6278 bacterial artificial chromosome (BACs) in the physical map were sequenced, fine structure was limited. To gain access to the gene‐containing portion of the barley genome at high resolution, we identified and sequenced 15 622 BACs representing the minimal tiling path of 72 052 physical‐mapped gene‐bearing BACs. This generated ~1.7 Gb of genomic sequence containing an estimated 2/3 of all Morex barley genes. Exploration of these sequenced BACs revealed that although distal ends of chromosomes contain most of the gene‐enriched BACs and are characterized by high recombination rates, there are also gene‐dense regions with suppressed recombination. We made use of published map‐anchored sequence data from Aegilops tauschii to develop a synteny viewer between barley and the ancestor of the wheat D‐genome. Except for some notable inversions, there is a high level of collinearity between the two species. The software HarvEST:Barley provides facile access to BAC sequences and their annotations, along with the barley–Ae. tauschii synteny viewer. These BAC sequences constitute a resource to improve the efficiency of marker development, map‐based cloning, and comparative genomics in barley and related crops. Additional knowledge about regions of the barley genome that are gene‐dense but low recombination is particularly relevant., Significance Statement We provide new genome sequence resources for barley and related species, to improve the efficiency of marker development, map‐based cloning, comparative genomics studies, and to provide insights into genome architecture. Notably, some of the gene‐rich islands in the barley genome deviate markedly from assumption that gene density and high recombination frequency are correlated.

Summary Cowpea (Vigna unguiculata L. Walp.) is a legume crop that is resilient to hot and drought-prone climates, and a primary source of protein in sub-Saharan Africa and other parts of the developing world. However, genome resources for cowpea have lagged behind most other major crops. Here we describe foundational genome resources and their application to analysis of germplasm currently in use in West African breeding programs. Resources developed from the African cultivar IT97K-499-35 include a whole-genome shotgun (WGS) assembly, a bacterial artificial chromosome (BAC) physical map, and assembled sequences from 4,355 BACs. These resources and WGS sequences of an additional 36 diverse cowpea accessions supported the development of a genotyping assay for 51,128 SNPs, which was then applied to five biparental RIL populations to produce a consensus genetic map containing 37,372 SNPs. This genetic map enabled the anchoring of 100 Mb of WGS and 420 Mb of BAC sequences, an exploration of genetic diversity along each linkage group, and clarification of macrosynteny between cowpea and common bean. The SNP assay enabled a diversity analysis of materials from West African breeding programs. Two major subpopulations exist within those materials, one of which has significant parentage from South and East Africa and more diversity. There are genomic regions of high differentiation between subpopulations, one of which coincides with a cluster of nodulin genes. The new resources and knowledge help to define goals and accelerate the breeding of improved varieties to address food security issues related to limited-input small-holder farming and climate stress. This article is protected by copyright. All rights reserved.

The greenbug, Schizaphis graminum (Rondani), is an important aphid pest of small grain crops especially wheat (Triticum aestivum L., 2n = 6x = 42, genomes AABBDD) in many parts of the world. The greenbug-resistance gene Gb3 originated from Aegilops tauschii Coss. (2n = 2x = 14, genome D(t)D(t)) has shown consistent and durable resistance against prevailing greenbug biotypes in wheat fields. We previously mapped Gb3 in a recombination-rich, telomeric bin of wheat chromosome arm 7DL. In this study, high-resolution genetic mapping was carried out using an F(2:3) segregating population derived from two Ae. tauschii accessions, the resistant PI 268210 (original donor of Gb3 in the hexaploid wheat germplasm line 'Largo') and susceptible AL8/78. Molecular markers were developed by exploring bin-mapped wheat RFLPs, SSRs, ESTs and the Ae. tauschii physical map (BAC contigs). Wheat EST and Ae. tauschii BAC end sequences located in the deletion bin 7DL3-0.82-1.00 were used to design STS (sequence tagged site) or CAPS (Cleaved Amplified Polymorphic Sequence) markers. Forty-five PCR-based markers were developed and mapped to the chromosomal region spanning the Gb3 locus. The greenbug-resistance gene Gb3 now was delimited in an interval of 1.1 cM by two molecular markers (HI067J6-R and HI009B3-R). This localized high-resolution genetic map with markers closely linked to Gb3 lays a solid foundation for map based cloning of Gb3 and marker-assisted selection of this gene in wheat breeding.

Positional cloning in bread wheat is a tedious task due to its huge genome size and hexaploid character. BAC libraries represent an essential tool for positional cloning. However, wheat BAC libraries comprise more than million clones, which makes their screening very laborious. Here, we present a targeted approach based on chromosome-specific BAC libraries. Such libraries were constructed from flow-sorted arms of wheat chromosome 7D. A library from the short arm (7DS) consisting of 49,152 clones with 113 kb insert size represented 12.1 arm equivalents whereas a library from the long arm (7DL) comprised 50,304 clones of 116 kb providing 14.9x arm coverage. The 7DS library was PCR screened with markers linked to Russian wheat aphid resistance geneDnCI2401, the 7DL library was screened by hybridization with a probe linked to greenbug resistance geneGb3. The small number of clones combined with high coverage made the screening highly efficient and cost effective.

Brachypodium distachyon (Brachypodium) has been recently recognized as an emerging model system for both comparative and functional genomics in grass species. In this study, 55,221 repeat masked Brachypodium BAC end sequences (BES) were used for comparative analysis against the 12 rice pseudomolecules. The analysis revealed that approximately 26.4% of BES have significant matches with the rice genome and 82.4% of the matches were homologous to known genes. Further analysis of paired-end BES and approximately 1.0 Mb sequences from nine selected BACs proved to be useful in revealing conserved regions and regions that have undergone considerable genomic changes. Differential gene amplification, insertions/deletions and inversions appeared to be the common evolutionary events that caused variations of microcolinearity at different orthologous genomic regions. It was found that approximately 17% of genes in the two genomes are not colinear in the orthologous regions. Analysis of BAC sequences also revealed higher gene density (approximately 9 kb/gene) and lower repeat DNA content (approximately 13.1%) in Brachypodium when compared to the orthologous rice regions, consistent with the smaller size of the Brachypodium genome. The 119 annotated Brachypodium genes were BLASTN compared against the wheat EST database and deletion bin mapped wheat ESTs. About 77% of the genes retrieved significant matches in the EST database, while 9.2% matched to the bin mapped ESTs. In some cases, genes in single Brachypodium BACs matched to multiple ESTs that were mapped to the same deletion bins, suggesting that the Brachypodium genome will be useful for ordering wheat ESTs within the deletion bins and developing specific markers at targeted regions in the wheat genome.

The current limitations in genome sequencing technology require the construction of physical maps for high-quality draft sequences of large plant genomes, such as that of Aegilops tauschii , the wheat D-genome progenitor. To construct a physical map of the Ae. tauschii genome, we fingerprinted 461,706 bacterial artificial chromosome clones, assembled contigs, designed a 10K Ae. tauschii Infinium SNP array, constructed a 7,185-marker genetic map, and anchored on the map contigs totaling 4.03 Gb. Using whole genome shotgun reads, we extended the SNP marker sequences and found 17,093 genes and gene fragments. We showed that collinearity of the Ae. tauschii genes with Brachypodium distachyon, rice, and sorghum decreased with phylogenetic distance and that structural genome evolution rates have been high across all investigated lineages in subfamily Pooideae, including that of Brachypodieae. We obtained additional information about the evolution of the seven Triticeae chromosomes from 12 ancestral chromosomes and uncovered a pattern of centromere inactivation accompanying nested chromosome insertions in grasses. We showed that the density of noncollinear genes along the Ae. tauschii chromosomes positively correlates with recombination rates, suggested a cause, and showed that new genes, exemplified by disease resistance genes, are preferentially located in high-recombination chromosome regions.

Background The presence of closely related genomes in polyploid species makes the assembly of total genomic sequence from shotgun sequence reads produced by the current sequencing platforms exceedingly difficult, if not impossible. Genomes of polyploid species could be sequenced following the ordered-clone sequencing approach employing contigs of bacterial artificial chromosome (BAC) clones and BAC-based physical maps. Although BAC contigs can currently be constructed for virtually any diploid organism with the SNaPshot high-information-content-fingerprinting (HICF) technology, it is currently unknown if this is also true for polyploid species. It is possible that BAC clones from orthologous regions of homoeologous chromosomes would share numerous restriction fragments and be therefore included into common contigs. Because of this and other concerns, physical mapping utilizing the SNaPshot HICF of BAC libraries of polyploid species has not been pursued and the possibility of doing so has not been assessed. The sole exception has been in common wheat, an allohexaploid in which it is possible to construct single-chromosome or single-chromosome-arm BAC libraries from DNA of flow-sorted chromosomes and bypass the obstacles created by polyploidy. Results The potential of the SNaPshot HICF technology for physical mapping of polyploid plants utilizing global BAC libraries was evaluated by assembling contigs of fingerprinted clones in an in silico merged BAC library composed of single-chromosome libraries of two wheat homoeologous chromosome arms, 3AS and 3DS, and complete chromosome 3B. Because the chromosome arm origin of each clone was known, it was possible to estimate the fidelity of contig assembly. On average 97.78% or more clones, depending on the library, were from a single chromosome arm. A large portion of the remaining clones was shown to be library contamination from other chromosomes, a feature that is unavoidable during the construction of single-chromosome BAC libraries. Conclusions The negligibly low level of incorporation of clones from homoeologous chromosome arms into a contig during contig assembly suggested that it is feasible to construct contigs and physical maps using global BAC libraries of wheat and almost certainly also of other plant polyploid species with genome sizes comparable to that of wheat. Because of the high purity of the resulting assembled contigs, they can be directly used for genome sequencing. It is currently unknown but possible that equally good BAC contigs can be also constructed for polyploid species containing smaller, more gene-rich genomes.

Due in part to its small genome (approximately 350 Mb), Brachypodium distachyon is emerging as a model system for temperate grasses, including important crops like wheat and barley. We present the analysis of 10.9% of the Brachypodium genome based on 64,696 bacterial artificial chromosome (BAC) end sequences (BES). Analysis of repeat DNA content in BES revealed that approximately 11.0% of the genome consists of known repetitive DNA. The vast majority of the Brachypodium repetitive elements are LTR retrotransposons. While Bare-1 retrotransposons are common to wheat and barley, Brachypodium repetitive element sequence-1 (BRES-1), closely related to Bare-1, is also abundant in Brachypodium. Moreover, unique Brachypodium repetitive element sequences identified constitute approximately 7.4% of its genome. Simple sequence repeats from BES were analyzed, and flanking primer sequences for SSR detection potentially useful for genetic mapping are available at http://brachypodium.pw.usda.gov . Sequence analyses of BES indicated that approximately 21.2% of the Brachypodium genome represents coding sequence. Furthermore, Brachypodium BES have more significant matches to ESTs from wheat than rice or maize, although these species have similar sizes of EST collections. A phylogenetic analysis based on 335 sequences shared among seven grass species further revealed a closer relationship between Brachypodium and Triticeae than Brachypodium and rice or maize.

For the vast majority of species – including many economically or ecologically important organisms, progress in biological research is hampered due to the lack of a reference genome sequence. Despite recent advances in sequencing technologies, several factors still limit the availability of such a critical resource. At the same time, many research groups and international consortia have already produced BAC libraries and physical maps and now are in a position to proceed with the development of whole-genome sequences organized around a physical map anchored to a genetic map. We propose a BAC-by-BAC sequencing protocol that combines combinatorial pooling design and second-generation sequencing technology to efficiently approach denovo selective genome sequencing. We show that combinatorial pooling is a cost-effective and practical alternative to exhaustive DNA barcoding when preparing sequencing libraries for hundreds or thousands of DNA samples, such as in this case gene-bearing minimum-tiling-path BAC clones. The novelty of the protocol hinges on the computational ability to efficiently compare hundred millions of short reads and assign them to the correct BAC clones (deconvolution) so that the assembly can be carried out clone-by-clone. Experimental results on simulated data for the rice genome show that the deconvolution is very accurate, and the resulting BAC assemblies have high quality. Results on real data for a gene-rich subset of the barley genome confirm that the deconvolution is accurate and the BAC assemblies have good quality. While our method cannot provide the level of completeness that one would achieve with a comprehensive whole-genome sequencing project, we show that it is quite successful in reconstructing the gene sequences within BACs. In the case of plants such as barley, this level of sequence knowledge is sufficient to support critical end-point objectives such as map-based cloning and marker-assisted breeding., Author Summary The problem of obtaining the full genomic sequence of an organism has been solved either via a global brute-force approach (called whole-genome shotgun) or by a divide-and-conquer strategy (called clone-by-clone). Both approaches have advantages and disadvantages in terms of cost, manual labor, and the ability to deal with sequencing errors and highly repetitive regions of the genome. With the advent of second-generation sequencing instruments, the whole-genome shotgun approach has been the preferred choice. The clone-by-clone strategy is, however, still very relevant for large complex genomes. In fact, several research groups and international consortia have produced clone libraries and physical maps for many economically or ecologically important organisms and now are in a position to proceed with sequencing. In this manuscript, we demonstrate the feasibility of this approach on the gene-space of a large, very repetitive plant genome. The novelty of our approach is that, in order to take advantage of the throughput of the current generation of sequencing instruments, we pool hundreds of clones using a special type of “smart” pooling design that allows one to establish with high accuracy the source clone from the sequenced reads in a pool. Extensive simulations and experimental results support our claims.

BackgroundBrachypodium distachyon(Brachypodium) has been recognized as a new model species for comparative and functional genomics of cereal and bioenergy crops because it possesses many biological attributes desirable in a model, such as a small genome size, short stature, self-pollinating habit, and short generation cycle. To maximize the utility ofBrachypodium as a model for basic and applied research it is necessary to develop genomic resources for it. A BAC-based physical map is one of them. A physical map will facilitate analysis of genome structure, comparative genomics, and assembly of the entire genome sequence.ResultsA total of 67,151BrachypodiumBAC clones were fingerprinted with the SNaPshot HICF fingerprinting method and a genome-wide physical map of theBrachypodiumgenome was constructed. The map consisted of 671 contigs and 2,161 clones remained as singletons. The contigs and singletons spanned 414 Mb. A total of 13,970 gene-related sequences were detected in the BAC end sequences (BES). These gene tags aligned 345 contigs with 336 Mb of rice genome sequence, showing thatBrachypodiumand rice genomes are generally highly colinear. Divergent regions were mainly in the rice centromeric regions. A dot-plot ofBrachypodiumcontigs against the rice genome sequences revealed remnants of the whole-genome duplication caused by paleotetraploidy, which were previously found in rice and sorghum.Brachypodiumcontigs were anchored to the wheat deletion bin maps with the BES gene-tags, opening the door toBrachypodium-Triticeae comparative genomics.ConclusionThe construction of theBrachypodiumphysical map, and its comparison with the rice genome sequence demonstrated the utility of the SNaPshot-HICF method in the construction of BAC-based physical maps. The map represents an important genomic resource for the completion ofBrachypodiumgenome sequence and grass comparative genomics. A draft of the physical map and its comparisons with rice and wheat are available athttp://phymap.ucdavis.edu/brachypodium/.

Background Current techniques of screening bacterial artificial chromosome (BAC) libraries for molecular markers during the construction of physical maps are slow, laborious and often assign multiple BAC contigs to a single locus on a genetic map. These limitations are the principal impediment in the construction of physical maps of large eukaryotic genomes. It is hypothesized that this impediment can be overcome by screening multidimensional pools of BAC clones using the highly parallel Illumina GoldenGate™ assay. Results To test the efficacy of the Golden Gate assay in BAC library screening, multidimensional pools involving 302976 Aegilops tauschii BAC clones were genotyped for the presence/absence of specific gene sequences with multiplexed Illumina GoldenGate oligonucleotide assays previously used to place single nucleotide polymorphisms on an Ae. tauschii genetic map. Of 1384 allele-informative oligonucleotide assays, 87.6% successfully clustered BAC pools into those positive for a BAC clone harboring a specific gene locus and those negative for it. The location of the positive BAC clones within contigs assembled from 199190 fingerprinted Ae. tauschii BAC clones was used to evaluate the precision of anchoring of BAC clones and contigs on the Ae. tauschii genetic map. For 41 (95%) assays, positive BAC clones were neighbors in single contigs. Those contigs could be unequivocally assigned to loci on the genetic map. For two (5%) assays, positive clones were in two different contigs and the relationships of these contigs to loci on the Ae. tauschii genetic map were equivocal. Screening of BAC libraries with a simple five-dimensional BAC pooling strategy was evaluated and shown to allow direct detection of positive BAC clones without the need for manual deconvolution of BAC clone pools. Conclusion The highly parallel Illumina oligonucleotide assay is shown here to be an efficient tool for screening BAC libraries and a strategy for high-throughput anchoring of BAC contigs on genetic maps during the construction of physical maps of eukaryotic genomes. In most cases, screening of BAC libraries with Illumina oligonucleotide assays results in the unequivocal relationship of BAC clones with loci on the genetic map.