ARS | Publication request: GENOME ORGANIZATION IN ALLIUM

Submitted to: Allium Crop Science
Publication Type: Review Article
Publication Acceptance Date: September 7, 2001
Publication Date: N/A

Technical Abstract: Our understanding of the structure, transmission, and diversity among the plant genomes has steadily increased over the last 100 years. The beginning of the twentieth century saw the rediscovery of Mendel's work in pea (Pisum sativum L.) and his laws of inheritance. Since that rediscovery, plants have been useful model organisms for studies on chromosome morphologies, aneuploidy, polyploidy, maternal transmission of phenotypes, and transposable elements. With the advent of molecular biology in the 1970s and 1980s, the ability to directly analyse DNA and to clone specific genes substantially increased our understanding of gene function and regulation. Representative higher-plant chloroplast and mitochondrial genomes were completely sequenced during the 1980s and 1990s. The twentieth century closed with the publishing of the complete sequence of the smaller nuclear chromosomes of the plant Arabidopsis thaliana L. Coinciding with the steady increase in knowledge about the plant genomes over the last 100 years, research on species within the genus Allium has revealed much about the structure of their chloroplast, mitochondrial, and nuclear genomes. The goal of this chapter is to review the literature describing these genomes to recognize their commonalities, as well as their uniqueness, as compared with other Angiosperms.