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ARS Home » Midwest Area » Madison, Wisconsin » Vegetable Crops Research » Research » Publications at this Location » Publication #264954
Title: An International Plan to Sequence the Onion Genome

Author
item Havey, Michael
item BOHANEC, BORUT - University Of Ljubljana
item MCCALLUM, JOHN - Plant And Food Research
item TOWN, CHRISTOPHER - J Craig Venter Institute

Submitted to: International Symposium on the Edible Alliaceae
Publication Type: Abstract Only
Publication Acceptance Date: 3/3/2011
Publication Date: 5/22/2012
Citation: Havey, M.J., Bohanec, B., Mccallum, J., Town, C. 2012. An International Plan to Sequence the Onion Genome. International Symposium on the Edible Alliaceae [abstract]. Paper. No. W-06.

Interpretive Summary:

Technical Abstract: The cost of DNA sequencing continues to decline and, in the near future, it will become reasonable to undertake sequencing of the enormous nuclear genome of onion. We undertook sequencing of expressed and genomic regions of the onion genome to learn about the structure of the onion genome, as well as the best approach for deep coverage sequencing. Transcriptome sequencing is underway in at least three countries and will provide deep coverage of expressed regions of the onion genome. As expected, pilot sequencing of onion genomic DNAs revealed very low gene densities. Importantly sequencing of random onion genomic clones after methyl filtration substantially increased hits to genic regions. These results indicate that sequencing of onion DNA should concentrate on expressed regions and reduced representation libraries to assemble a unigene set for onion and reveal SNPs for high throughput genotyping and molecular-aided selection.