Corn Genome Sequenced

dooling writes "Later this week, the completion of the maize genome draft sequence will be announced. Maize has a large genome (slightly smaller than human) that is highly repetitive (about 80%). These facts made a whole-genome shotgun approach to sequencing infeasible. Therefore, a BAC-by-BAC approach was taken, similar to what was done for the Human Genome Project. Further work on the maize genome will focus on the parts of the genome that have genes, thereby avoiding the highly-repetitive regions of the genome (even though the maize genome is slightly smaller than human, it is thought to have about twice as many genes). You can read my take here."

Comments

Plants Humans

[imstanny]

Maize has a large genome (slightly smaller than human) that is highly repetitive (about 80%) Humans have about 22,000 genes. Plants tend to have in teh range of 40,000 genes - on average. THis is suprising initially, but human genes are more complex. Single genes can make at least 2 proteins, sometimes much more. Plants, on the other hand, have to produce a lot of chemicals for defence, since they can't run away from predators - which is the primary reason for increased gene count. Maze, it seems, is one the lower end for plant life in terms of gene count.

Re:So?

[moderatorrater]

Go sequence a mouse. What's the point of sequencing something that we kill? Corn's one of the more useful crops in the world, so sequencing it makes sense. If we understand the genome, we can make new varieties better.

Also, corn is where we first noticed jumping genes.

Re:So?

[dooling]

We've sequenced the genome of something we eat. This helps us why? Go sequence a mouse. We have already sequenced the mouse.

Re:Plants Humans

[swid27]

(Food) plants also have a larger set of possible allele combinations per gene, as they usually have 3, 4, 6 or 8 copies of each chromosome. (You and I have to get by with "only" 2.)