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Database Will Disclose Promising Wheats
Genetic Identity
By
Marcia Wood September 30, 2008
Every year, wheat and barley breeders mail snippets of plant leaves to
an Agricultural Research Service (ARS)
laboratory in Fargo, N.D.
Molecular geneticist
Shiaoman
Chao is ready for the deluge of young, carefully preserved leaves that show
up in her mail at the agency's
Cereal
Crops Research Unit in Fargo. She uses them in determining the genetic
identity--or genotype--of wheat plants. The information she gleans from her
analyses is invaluable to plant breeders because it can help them determine
whether the progeny of their plant breeding programs have what it takes to
succeed in Americas vast fields of grain.
Chao sends the results not only to the breeders, but also to a new
database that she is designing and building. It houses the findings generated
at her lab as well as from other research locations.
With breeders cooperation, Chao plans to eventually make the
database public. Shes working toward that goal with ARS scientists in the
Genomics
and Gene Discovery Research Unit, part of the agencys
Western
Regional Research Center at Albany, California. The California team, led by
geneticist
Olin D.
Anderson, curates the massive
GrainGenes database.
Plans call for Chaos database to become accessible through
GrainGenes. Breeders looking for wheat or barley plants with prized traits
could search for those plants and traits on Chaos database via
GrainGenes.
GrainGenes is an apt choice of Web venue. In the United States and
abroad, plant breeders and others already know that this site is a treasure
trove of genetic information about wheat, barley and other small
grains like rye, oats and triticale. Making the genotype results
accessible there means theyll be widely available as quickly as possible,
according to Chao.
GrainGenes is located at
http://wheat.pw.usda.gov.
ARS is a scientific research agency of the
U.S. Department of
Agriculture.