The Yellow Brick Road to a Hexaploid Oat Zipper (OZ) - Act II

The hexaploid oat (Avena sativa L.) is an important cereal crop worldwide, cultivated to produce grains for the food industry as well as animal feeding. For its importance, oat was chosen as one of the crops of the Plant Pathway Elucidation Project (P2EP), a groundbreaking $1.5 million program that engages college students from across North Carolina in a first-of-its-kind education and research endeavor with the objective of the discover of plant pathways aiming help plant breeders to build better plants for the world. As demonstrated in model plants like arabidopsis and plants with great economic value such as corn and soybean, the power of having a genome available is tremendous and leads several research groups to new discoveries with lower costs and in less time. Like Dorothy in the Wizard of Oz, the first act was to gather resources; EST-based SNP markers, GBS markers and linkage maps from several collaborative mapping populations and then walk through the Yellow Brick Road to construct an Oat Consensus Map (Act I). Two different oat populations where chosen and we are now sequencing them through shotgun sequencing to create a hexaploid genome zipper (the Oat Zipper, OZ). We are now assembling reads and anchoring them to the consensus map as reference to build the physical map and full genome, as well as developing an interactive browser for visualization. These steps will allow us to add transcriptome data for annotation as a third layer and help to accelerate the scientific discovery and genetic improvement for oats.