Skip to main content
ARS Home » Pacific West Area » Aberdeen, Idaho » Small Grains and Potato Germplasm Research » Research » Publications at this Location » Publication #102624

Title: BARLEY CULTIVAR IDENTIFICATION WITH MOLECULAR TECHNIQUES

Author
item Hoffman, David
item Hang, An

Submitted to: North American Barley Research Workshop Proceedings
Publication Type: Abstract Only
Publication Acceptance Date: 3/17/1999
Publication Date: N/A
Citation: N/A

Interpretive Summary:

Technical Abstract: Cultivar identification is important to the barley malting and brewing industries. As breeders work within narrow gene pools, the more traditional methods of identification, such as seed morphology and protein electrophoresis, have become ineffective. Modern tools of biotechnology that can detect DNA sequence differences have been employed to identify cultivars from a narrow genetic base. Of the techniques, the polymerse chain reaction with short, random primers (PCR-RAPD) was effective in distinguishing among a set of six-rowed malting barley cultivars. However, the reported lack of reproducibility of the PCR-RAPD technique among laboratories has limited its widespread acceptance as a detection tool. To address this problem, we cloned and sequenced RAPD fragments that mapped to polymorphic regions of six- rowed malting barley. Several single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) were identified between 'Robust' and 'Stander', a key comparison. The DNA sequence information was used to design a sequence-tagged-site PCR primer pair that amplified an 800 base pair DNA fragment. This fragment, when digested with Alu1, resulted in a pattern that could distinguish Stander from Robust and vice versa. Another procedure, amplified fragment length polymorphism (AFLP), was investigated as to its ability to reliably differentiate among certain six-rowed malting barley cultivars. Numerous AFLPs were found among the cultivars, and these will be reported. This work has identified alternative procedures that can distinguish certain six-rowed malting barley cultivars in addition to the previously reported PCR-RAPD method.