Aegilops tauschii Genome sequencing. Aegilops tauschii

Bread wheat is one of three pillars on which the global food supply rests. Despite the exceptional importance of wheat, a high-quality draft reference sequence of the wheat genome is not available due primarily to its hybrid origin (polyploidy) and the enormous size of its genome. To assist the international bread wheat genome sequencing effort, a high quality draft of the genome of Aegilops tauschii, one of the three progenitors of bread wheat, will be produced. The large size and great complexity of the Ae. tauschii genome necessitate adopting the ordered-clone sequencing strategy for generating a high-quality genome sequence draft. This strategy will involve the sequencing of about 50,000 bacterial artificial chromosome (BAC) clones harboring large fragments of Ae. tauschii DNA that have been ordered to represent the contiguous sequence of nucleotides in Ae. tauschii chromosomal DNA. Pools of BAC clones will be sequenced with a next generation DNA sequencing platform and assembled into long contiguous sequences. The correctness of the assembled sequences will be validated with a novel optical nanotechnique.