YIA: Identifying the Targets of Selection During Sunflower Domestication

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Award AbstractThe domestication of crop plants from their wild relatives is a result of strong selection on traits relating to things such as seed dormancy and dispersal, growth form, flowering time, yield, palatability, and nutritional value. This selection results in a characteristic decrease in genetic variation in and around the genes controlling such traits, thereby providing a means for identifying agronomically important genes. This research is aimed at identifying and characterizing genes that experienced selection during the domestication and subsequent improvement of sunflower. The primary goal of this research is to identify genes that bear the population genetic 'signature of selection' based on data derived from molecular genetic markers and DNA sequencing. A related goal is to investigate the function of these genes on the basis of their genomic locations relative to traits that have previously been mapped in sunflower as well as through analyses of gene expression. Taken together, the results of this research will provide a much more detailed understanding of the origin and evolution of one of the world's most important oilseed crops than is currently available. This work will also result in the development of permanent genetic resources for the scientific community, including 800 gene-based simple sequence repeat (SSR) markers as well as DNA sequence data derived from both putatively selected genes and candidate genes identified on the basis of their similarity to genes of known function from other taxa. All data will be made available upon publication via public databases including COMPOSITdb (http://compositdb.ucdavis.edu), the Compositae Genome Project Database (http://compgenomics.ucdavis.edu), and GenBank. Finally, this work will result in the training of undergraduates, graduate students, and postdoctoral researchers in the development and utilization of genomic tools, as well as the analysis of large molecular datasets