www.checkbiotech.org ; www.raupp.info ; www.czu.cz

Maize, though important to trade and science, is a crop whose genome is
still incompletely sequenced. The costs and complexity of completing the
maize genome has long held back such a project, not only because of the crop
?s genome size, but because of the presence of repetitive elements, which
pose computational challenges for accurately assembling the entire sequence,
December 2005.

In the latest issue of Plant Physiology, Georg Haberer of the Munich
Information Center for Protein Sequences, and colleagues take the first shot
at studying the ?Structure and Architecture of the Maize Genome.?
Researchers carry the analysis out by selecting 100 random regions of the
genome averaging 144 kilobases of DNA in size, and using these regions as a
dataset possibly representative of the entire maize genome.

Their analysis showed, among others, that a) at least 66% of the whole maize
genome is composed of repetitive elements; b) maize has 42,000-56,000 genes
in total, substantially more than rice or Arabidopsis; c) these same genes
average about 4,000 DNA base pairs in size; and d) much of the increase in
genome size of maize relative to rice and Arabidopsis can be attributed to
an increase in number of both repetitive elements and genes.

Subscribers to Plant Physiology can read the complete article at:
[www.plantphysiol.org]

Other readers may access the abstract at:
[www.plantphysiol.org]

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