Maize Genome Sequencing Pilot Project

Project Goals

Maize (Zea mays) is a crop with a great economic significance as well as a storied history as a model organism for genetic studies of plants. With the completion of the sequences of the Arabidopsis and rice genomes, there is great interest focused on maize as the next plant genome to be sequenced. Technological advances and decreasing costs make the goal of obtaining the complete sequence of the maize genome highly attainable, however, the maize genome poses some challenges to conventional sequencing strategies. Besides its relatively large size (~2.5Gb), the genome has a very high repeat content (estimated at 60- 70% or higher).

The Broad Institute is part of a consortium known as STMG (Sequencing The Maize Genome). The consortium has been funded by the NSF as part of a pilot project to evaluate strategies for producing a sequence of the Maize genome, and to generate genome resources for the community. We are doing this by first providing data by shotgun sequencing BACs from the Arizona maize BAC library, including 100 randomly selected BACs and 40 BACs from a contiguous region. These data are being used in a series of assemblies and analyses which will inform help us devise an optimal strategy (in terms of both cost and quality) for generation of a sequence of the entire maize genome. In addition, the landscape of the genome is not well understood on a global scale. These data will illuminate the distribution and similarity of repeats and the distribution of genes across the genome.

• Joachim Messing
  Waksman Institute, Rutgers University (http://pgir.rutgers.edu/)
• Klaus Mayer
  Munich Information Center for Protein Sciences (MIPS) (http://www.mips.biochem.mpg.de/)
• Rod Wing
  Arizona Genomics Institute (AGI), University of Arizona (http://www.genome.arizona.edu/)
• Cari Soderland
  Arizona Genomics Computational Laboratory (AGCoL), University of Arizona (http://www.genome.arizona.edu/)