Projects per year
Abstract
In many cultivated crop species there is limited genetic variation available for the development of new higher yielding varieties adapted to climate change and sustainable farming practises. The distant relatives of crop species provide a vast and largely untapped reservoir of genetic variation for a wide range of agronomically important traits that can be exploited by breeders for crop improvement. In this paper, in what we believe to be the largest introgression programme undertaken in the monocots, we describe the transfer of the entire genome of Festuca pratensis into Lolium perenne in overlapping chromosome segments. The L. perenne/F. pratensis introgressions were identified and characterised via 131 simple sequence repeats and 1612 SNPs anchored to the rice genome. Comparative analyses were undertaken to determine the syntenic relationship between L. perenne/F. pratensis and rice, wheat, barley, sorghum and Brachypodium distachyon. Analyses comparing recombination frequency and gene distribution indicated that a large proportion of the genes within the genome are located in the proximal regions of chromosomes which undergo low/very low frequencies of recombination. Thus, it is proposed that past breeding efforts to produce improved varieties have centred on the subset of genes located in the distal regions of chromosomes where recombination is highest. The use of alien introgression for crop improvement is important for meeting the challenges of global food supply and the monocots such as the forage grasses and cereals, together with recent technological advances in molecular biology, can help meet these challenges.
Original language | English |
---|---|
Pages (from-to) | 475–483 |
Number of pages | 9 |
Journal | Heredity |
Volume | 110 |
Issue number | 5 |
DOIs | |
Publication status | Published - 16 Jan 2013 |
Keywords
- Introgression mapping
- comparative mapping
- recombination
- interspecific diversity
- monocots
- SNP markers
- Interspecific diversity
- Monocots
- Comparative mapping
- Recombination
- Sorghum/genetics
- Lolium/genetics
- Synteny
- Genetic Variation
- Hordeum/genetics
- Festuca/genetics
- Microsatellite Repeats
- Genetic Linkage
- Chromosome Mapping/methods
- Gene Transfer, Horizontal
- Meiosis
- Triticum/genetics
- Genome, Plant
- Brachypodium/genetics
- Chromosomes, Plant
- Genetic Engineering/methods
- Crops, Agricultural/genetics
- Polymorphism, Single Nucleotide
Fingerprint
Dive into the research topics of 'Exploitation of interspecific diversity for monocot crop improvement'. Together they form a unique fingerprint.Projects
- 1 Finished
-
Introgression and wide hybrid genetics, genomics and germplasm development in Lolium/Festuca (Festulolium) and white clover
Armstead, I. (PI)
01 Apr 2012 → 31 Mar 2017
Project: Externally funded research