The International-Oryza Map Alignment Project: A Golden Path to Unlock the Genetic Diversity Hidden Within the Wild Relatives of Rice

The International-Oryza Map Alignment Project was organized in 2007 at the ISRFG meeting in Tsukuba, Japan, and has held annual progress report and coordination meetings in conjunction with the ISRFG meetings ever since. The overarching goal of IOMAP is to create and exploit a genus-level comparative genomics platform that can be used to address fundamental and applied questions in evolutionary biology and plant breeding to help solve the 9 billion-people question.  The three main research foci of I-OMAP are to: 1) Generate Reference Genome Sequences for all eight AA genome species, and a representative species of the nine other genome types (BB,CC,BBCC,CCDD,EE,FF,GG, KKLL, HHJJ); 2) Generate, Catalogue, and Provided Access to ABC, CSSL, RIL populations for the AA genome species for functional and breeding studies; and 3) Identify collections of naturally occurring populations of the wild Oryza species for diversity, conservation, population and evolutionary analyses.

This talk will discuss I-OMAP’s progress in sequencing and annotating the collective Oryzagenome with a special emphasis on four genomes recently completed at the Arizona Genomics Institute (AGI) –  O. glaberrima [AA], O. barthii [AA], O. punctata [BB], and Leersia perrieri(Oryza out group species).