This database is part of the effort of project Coupling Expressed Sequences and Bacterial Artificial Chromosome Resources to Access the Barley Genome, which has been funded by NSF Plant Genome Research Program since 2003.

The Triticeae genomes, each with a size of about 5 x 10⁹ base pairs per haploid genome, are too large to seriously consider whole-genome sequencing at present. This is about 12 times the size of rice. Yet, reliable methods can be immediately employed to gain access to the majority of expressed genes in Triticeae genomes. During the past several years, considerable progress has been made in the establishment of core public resources in barley genomics. These core resources include genomic bacterial artificial chromosome (BAC) libraries and cDNA libraries, several widely used mapping populations, more than 380,000 partial cDNA sequences (Expressed Sequence Tags; ESTs) representing at least 50% of all genes in the barley genome, and a microarray that makes it possible to simultaneously monitor the expression of more than half of these genes. The purpose of this project is to couple these resources to facilitate access of US and worldwide researchers to the barley genome, thereby building a fuller understanding of cereal plant traits that are pertinent to agriculture and biology. The unifying objective is to accelerate a transition to comprehensive physical mapping and the sequencing of the gene-containing regions of the barley genome.

The automated, high-throughput, high-information-content fingerprinting technique (Luo et al. 2003) was adopted to fingerprint selected BAC clones. The clones were assembled into contigs with FPC software packages (Soderlund et al. 2000).

Investigators:

• Timothy J. Close (PI), University of California, Riverside
• Tao Jiang (co-PI), University of California, Riverside
• Stefano Lonardi (co-PI), University of California, Riverside
• Ming-Cheng Luo (co-PI), University of California, Davis