An international research consortium has sequenced the genome of the woodland strawberry, according to a study published in the Dec. 26 advance online edition of the journal Nature Genetics. The development is expected to unlock possibilities for breeding tastier, hardier varieties of the berry and other crops in its family.
"We've created the strawberry parts list," said the consortium's leader Kevin Folta, an associate professor with the University of Florida's Institute of Food and Agricultural Sciences. "For every organism on the planet, if you're going to try to do any advanced science or use molecular-assisted breeding, a parts list is really helpful. In the old days, we had to go out and figure out what the parts were. Now we know the components that make up the strawberry plant."
From a genetic standpoint, the woodland strawberry, formally known as Fragaria vesca, is similar to the cultivated strawberry but less complex, making it easier for scientists to study. The 14-chromosome woodland strawberry has one of the smallest genomes of economically significant plants, but still contains approximately 240 million base pairs.
The consortium of 75 researchers from 38 institutions that sequenced the genome included two Georgia Tech researchers. They are Mark Borodovsky, a Regents professor with a joint appointment in the Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering at Georgia Tech and Emory University and the Georgia Tech School of Computational Science and Engineering, and Paul Burns, who worked on the project as a bioinformatics Ph.D. student.
Once the consortium uncovered the genomic sequence of the woodland strawberry, Borodovsky and Burns led the efforts in identifying protein-coding genes in the sequence. Using a newly developed pattern recognition program called GeneMark.hmm-ES+, Borodovsky and Burns identified 34,809 genes, of which 55 percent were assigned to gene families.
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| Contact: Abby Vogel Robinson abby@innovate.gatech.edu 404-385-3364 Georgia Institute of Technology Research News Source:Eurekalert |
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