Analyzing the Barley genome

Ensembl Plants (http://plants.ensembl.org) is an integrative resource offering access to plant genomic scale, maintained at the European Bioinformatics Institute in Hinxton, UK.  We collaborate closely with Gramene to maintain a common set of reference databases for plant genomes and variation.  In our latest release, we have added a number of new genomes including barley, potato and banana, and have additionally included data from a preliminary wheat genome assembly.  The barley genome (published in Nature, 2012, by the International Barley Sequencing Consortium) is a "gene-space" assembly, in which assembled contigs (mainly comprising the genic regions of the chromosome) have been assembled into pseudo-scaffolds located on a physical map.  The wheat genome (Branchley et al, in press) is presently too fragmented to be presented in the same way, but has instead been mapped to the Brachypodium genome; this allows the display of a total of 117411 heterologous SNPs in the context of complete gene models.  In this talk, I will demonstrate how these genomes appear in the Ensembl Plants and Gramene genome browsers, and present some results from their comparative analysis against previously sequenced genomes.