Sugarcane BAC Libraries: Construction, Strategic Screening And Validation

Plant genomes are complexes regarding many aspects, their large size, their polyploidy and the high percentage of repetitive elements. Next-generation DNA sequencing technologies have revolutionized the genomic research by offering the capacity to obtain large amount of sequences in a short time. However, this approach is not sufficient to decipher the high complexity of plant genomes. Bacterial Artificial Chromosome (BAC) libraries are still invaluable tools for plant genome analysis. The French Plant Genomic Resource Center (INRA - CNRGV) is in charge of more than 10 millions unique BAC samples belonging to more than 100 model and crop plant genomic libraries (http://cnrgv.toulouse.inra.fr/en/Library) and is a leader in the development of approaches involving BAC libraries to study plant genomes.

Sugarcane is the most important plant used for ethanol production; it is very widespread in Brazil and has a complicated and poor understood genetics. In order to better understand the sugarcane variety used in Brazil, we have constructed two BAC libraries using the Brazilian important varieties SP 803280 and IAC SP 933046. The resulting BAC libraries are represented by 221,184 clones for the SP 803280 genotype and 165,888 BAC clones for the IAC SP 933046 genotype. Both libraries with a medium insert size of around 110kb, cover the whole genome around 2.2X and 1.6X, respectively. Both libraries constructed result in the two biggest sugarcane BAC libraries worldwide available yet. We will describe some results obtained using these BAC libraries which confirm the interest and the genetic representation of both BAC libraries.