A team led by scientists at the University of California, Riverside has reached a new milestone in its work, begun in 2000, on sequencing the barley genome. The researchers have sequenced large portions of the genome that together contain nearly two-thirds of all barley genes.
The new information, published in The Plant Journal, will not only expand geneticists’ knowledge of barley’s DNA but will also help in the understanding, at the genetic level, of wheat and other sources of food. It also has applications in plant breeding by increasing the precision of markers for traits such as malting quality or stem rust.
Because barley is a close relative to wheat, the new work could offer useful information leading to the complete sequencing of the wheat genome.
More information is available here: http://ucrtoday.ucr.edu/31060
