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This article explores the importance of studying rice DNA through optical mapping, which provides a comprehensive overview of the genome structure. Optical maps help fill sequence gaps, identify vital regions for crop traits, and accelerate the development of better rice hybrids.
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Optical Mapping of Rice DNA Michael Bechner
Three Main Questions • Why rice? What is the importance from a societal point of view? Scientific point of view? • What is optical mapping? How is an Optical Map of Rice made? • Where can we go from here? What use is all of this information?
Why Rice? It’s important to Society. • Approx. 600 million tons of rice produced in 1999. • 21% of the world’s daily caloric intake comes from rice. • Asia accounts for 90% of rice production and consumption. • Rice is a human consumption crop that is not generally used for livestock (e.g. corn).
Importance of Rice in the Four Largest Countries Source: IRRI World Rice Statistics
Daily Calories from Rice Source: IRRI World Rice Statistics
Why we need to study rice • To meet rising population needs, especially in Asia, rice production needs to increase by 70% in the next 30 years. • Since available farming land is becoming more scarce, farmers will need to be able to increase the yield of each plant. • In addition, we also want to find ways of protecting crops from environmental stress, parasites, disease, and competition from weeds. • The rice genome will help us identify ways of solving these problems.
Small Genome Size A lot of data already available about rice DNA through major sequencing projects. The larger crop genomes have much of the same DNA only repeated many times Why start with rice?
Microscopic channels Used to stretch out DNA molecules so they are parallel to each other.
An idea about scale 1 micron=.00004 inches Width of human hair: 50-70 microns Bacteria: 2 microns 20 microns 100 nanometers 300 base pairs (or 30 helix turns) 6.7 nm 60 base pairs
What will an optical map of rice do? • A map would give us an overview of the structure of the rice genome. • Sequence often has gaps. We can compare our map with the sequence, find the overlap, and help fill the gaps.
What do we do with this? • We use this map first to assist in the finishing of the sequence. • The sequence can be used to quickly identify and study regions involved in growth, disease resistance, drought resistance, and grain quality. • Increased understanding of rice traits by studying the sequence will allow breeders to obtain better hybrids in a much shorter time.
The Rice Team • Laboratory of Molecular and Computational Genomics • Dr. David C. Schwartz • Project leaders: • Osmat Azzam-Jefferson; Ana Garic-Stankovic • Lab technicians, grad students, and computer personnel: • Michael Bechner; Aaron Andersen; Jessica Severin; Natalie Kaech; Rod Runnheim; Dan Forrest; Eileen Dimalanta; Shiguo Zhou; Erika Kvikstad; Andrew Kile; Alex Lim; Chris Churas