Project name: Hordeum vulgare

Description: Barley is an economically important cereal crop, along with wheat and rye. It belongs to the family Gramineae, tribe Triticieae. Barley is the most widely cultivated diploid member of this tribe, making it a good model for this entire group of plants. Obtaining barley sequence will be useful as it contains genes for agronomically desirable traits like stress, pest and disease resistance. At the same time, sequence analysis will help improve the feed quality. Since the genome of members of Triticeae are large (about 5000 Mb for barley), barley researchers have put their efforts into developing a physical map of barley and creating large number of ESTs which are used to identify loci in a genetic map. The North American Barley Genome project is a multi-institutional, multidisciplinary project that is involved in locating and characterizing genes of economic importance and to use these genes in applied plant breeding. A number of groups have begun collecting sequence from different cultivars.

Relevance: Agricultural

Last updated: 2003-11-12