Low-pass shotgun sequencing of the barley genome facilitates rapid identification of genes, conserved non-coding sequences and novel repeats

Barley has one of the largest and most complex genomes of all economically important food crops. The rise of new short read sequencing technologies such as Illumina/Solexa permits such large genomes to be effectively sampled at relatively low cost. Based on the corresponding sequence reads a Mathematically Defined Repeat (MDR) index can be generated to map repetitive regions in genomic sequences.