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ARS Home » Midwest Area » Ames, Iowa » Corn Insects and Crop Genetics Research » Research » Publications at this Location » Publication #382111
Research Project: MaizeGDB: Enabling Access to Basic, Translational, and Applied Research Information

Location: Corn Insects and Crop Genetics Research

Title: History of the maize genome sequence assemblies

Author
item Harper, Elisabeth
item GARDINER, JACK - University Of Missouri
item Schaeffer, Mary
item Cannon, Ethalinda
item Portwood, John
item Woodhouse, Margaret
item Andorf, Carson

Submitted to: Maize Annual Meetings
Publication Type: Abstract Only
Publication Acceptance Date: 3/6/2021
Publication Date: 3/8/2021
Citation: Harper, E.C., Gardiner, J.M., Schaeffer, M.L., Cannon, E.K., Portwood Ii, J.L., Woodhouse, M.H., Andorf, C.M. 2021. History of the maize genome sequence assemblies. Maize Annual Meetings. 59.

Interpretive Summary:

Technical Abstract: It has been 12 years since the first maize genome sequence was announced at the 2008 Maize Meeting in Washington DC, but the quest for a contiguous genome sequence of maize started long before 2008. In 1998 a huge effort was launched to generate tools to construct a genome assembly of maize. Public BAC libraries were generated, and BAC contigs assembled based on the restriction enzymes fingerprinting strategy developed for the human genome sequence. The contig assembly was facilitated by various marker strategies (SSR, overgo) and where the newly developed SSR markers could be genetically mapped. On the genetic side, a fine resolution genetic map was created by the critical step of inter-mating F2s for multiple generations to build the populations that lead to the IBM (Intermated B73 x Mo17) genetic maps. When these tools were ready, a minimum tiling path through the BACs was selected and those BACs were sequenced and assembled into contigs and scaffolds, and the first BAC-based genome assembly was made available in 2008. A year later in 2009, a pseudomolecule version for each of the ten chromosomes of the B73 genome (RefGen_v1) was published and released. The community has made substantial advances since these remarkable achievements. In January 2021, the NAM sequencing consortium released the official gene models for a set of 26 complete genomes (the NAM founders and B73) that were identically sequenced, assembled and annotated so that all 26 genomes are directly comparable. In this poster, we document the history of maize genome assemblies, review the major advances that sequenced genomes have brought to maize research, and honor the hundreds of scientists that made the complete genome sequence of maize possible.