The team of researchers at UC Davis, led by Dr Jan Dvorak, will use the Irys System in their workflow as they determine the sequence, location and orientation of all genes and transposable elements of the A. tauschii genome.
This information will be used to advance the assembly and analysis of the wheat genome sequence, which is known to be five times larger and significantly more complex than the human genome.
“Among the world’s essential crops for human and animal food, the wheat genome has yet to be fully realised because of its complexity,” said Erik Holmlin, president and CEO of BioNano Genomics. “The UC Davis team’s research with A. tauschii will help determine how wheat genome is organised and contribute to the large international effort to decode the genome of one of the world’s most important food crops.”
Bread wheat (Triticum aestivum L.) is a hexaploid species containing three different ancestral genomes (designated A, B and D), each of which has seven pairs of chromosomes. In addition, approximately 90% of the wheat genome is made up of repetitive stretches of DNA, making the assembly of an accurate and complete genome map and genome sequence extremely difficult.
As the progenitor to wheat’s D genome, A. tauschii is a wild grass that spontaneously hybridised with cultivated tetraploid wheat 8,000 years ago, producing what we know today as bread wheat.
To assemble a genome de novo (from scratch), scientists must determine how the small lengths of DNA sequences generated from short-read next generation sequencing (NGS) methods are organised in the whole genome.
BioNano’s Irys System is a genome mapping technology that fills a void in de novo assemblies by providing a high-resolution physical genome map to anchor and organise DNA sequence information to dramatically improve the fidelity of the final genome assembly.
The United Nations has said that harvest yield of wheat will need to increase by 60% by 2050 to meet the dietary needs for our expected population growth. However, wheat output has recently plateaued, causing alarm in the wheat research and production community.
A more complete genomic map of wheat and ultimately genome sequence could provide important information on how wheat adapts to drought, disease and temperature changes.
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