Low Coverage BAC Libraries and BAC NGS Sequencing: A Powerful Tool for Comparative Genomics of Complex Plant Genomes

Plant genomes are complex regarding many aspects: genome size, polyploidy level 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 fully decipher the high complexity of plant genomes and 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 fourteen millions unique BAC samples belonging to more than 150 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.

To answer needs for plant genomics, we developed a new strategy using low coverage BAC libraries in order to efficiently target genomic regions of interest. The low coverage limits the steps of BAC clones organization in microplates, thus reducing cost and labor. This approach is powerful for sequencing regions of agronomic interest as well as performing comparative genomic studies in plants.

We will discuss the interest of a low coverage BAC library strategy -combining low-coverage BAC library with sequencing pools of BACs- for local comparative studies of complex plant genomes.  As an example, we will show how this approach was used to fulfill the needs of a project comparing a genomic region between 5 maize inbred lines representative of the American/European germplasm (PI: C.Vitte, UMR de génétique végétale).

Back to: Genome Technology: Large Insert Libraries - Even

<< Previous Poster | Next Poster >>