Sequencing Barley Chromosome 5H

The International Barley Sequencing Consortium, Chengdao Li¹, Matthew Bellgard¹, Guoping Zhang², Roberto Barrero¹, Qisen Zhang¹, John McCooke¹, Gaofeng Zhou¹, Xiaoqi Zhang¹

¹Murdoch University, 90 South Street, Murdoch, WA6150, Australia

²Zhejiang University, Hangzhou, China

 

Barley has a large and complex genome with 5.1 billion base-pairs assembled into seven chromosomes. An International Barley Genome Sequencing Consortium was formed to construct a barley reference genome sequence based on the physical map.  As part of the international consortium, we sequenced chromosome 5H.  The whole chromosome is covered by about 8400 minimum tilling path BACs.  The combined assemble of chromosome 5H is 658 M base-pairs, which represent about 87% of estimated chromosome size. 17,000 molecular markers are aligned to the chromosome 5H physical map and genome sequence, which provide the basis to isolate genes and develop diagnostic molecular markers for yield, malting quality and disease resistance.