Construction of Comprehensive Sequence Indexed Transposon Resources for Maize

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PI: Donald McCarty, University of FloridaCoPI: Karen Koch, University of FloridaCollaborators: Rob Martienssen, W. Richard McCombie, Cold Spring Harbor LaboratoriesCollaborator: Carolyn Lawrence, Iowa State UniversityMaize is a key model organism for plant biology and genetics research in addition to being among the world''''s economically most important crops. The complete sequencing of the maize genome currently in progress will enable researchers to identify the complete set of genes required to make a maize plant. In order to understand the functions and interactions of those genes, researchers will require methods for systematically generating genetic mutations that disrupt each gene. For this purpose, large populations of maize plants containing active Mutator transposons have been created to saturate the genome with insertional mutations. To enable diverse maize researcher's world-wide to easily identify and obtain mutations in genes of interest, a DNA sequence based index of the location of each insertion site in the genome will be created for the UniformMu inbred maize population. The sequence index database is expected to contain annotations of up to 100,000 unique transposon insertion sites in a collection of 8050 maize lines. The broader impacts of the project will include providing rich research experiences in bioinformatics, state-of-the-art DNA sequencing technologies, maize genetics and transposon biology to diverse undergraduates. A public interface to the resource will be provided through the MaizeGDB.org web portal. These will enable individual researchers to identify mutations of interest and obtain seed of mutant stocks from the Maize Genetics Cooperation Stock Center.