Physical mapping and BAC-end sequence analysis provide initial insights into the flax (Linum usitatissimum L.) genome

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>Flax (<it>Linum usitatissimum </it>L.) is an important source of oil rich in omega-3 fatty acids, which have proven health benefits and utility as an industrial raw material. Flax seeds also contain lignans which are associated with reducing the risk of certain types of cancer. Its bast fibres have broad industrial applications. However, genomic tools needed for molecular breeding were non existent. Hence a project, Total Utilization Flax GENomics (TUFGEN) was initiated. We report here the first genome-wide physical map of flax and the generation and analysis of BAC-end sequences (BES) from 43,776 clones, providing initial insights into the genome.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>The physical map consists of 416 contigs spanning ~368 Mb, assembled from 32,025 fingerprints, representing roughly 54.5% to 99.4% of the estimated haploid genome (370-675 Mb). The N50 size of the contigs was estimated to be ~1,494 kb. The longest contig was ~5,562 kb comprising 437 clones. There were 96 contigs containing more than 100 clones. Approximately 54.6 Mb representing 8-14.8% of the genome was obtained from 80,337 BES. Annotation revealed that a large part of the genome consists of ribosomal DNA (~13.8%), followed by known transposable elements at 6.1%. Furthermore, ~7.4% of sequence was identified to harbour novel repeat elements. Homology searches against flax-ESTs and NCBI-ESTs suggested that ~5.6% of the transcriptome is unique to flax. A total of 4064 putative genomic SSRs were identified and are being developed as novel markers for their use in molecular breeding.</p> <p>Conclusion</p> <p>The first genome-wide physical map of flax constructed with BAC clones provides a framework for accessing target loci with economic importance for marker development and positional cloning. Analysis of the BES has provided insights into the uniqueness of the flax genome. Compared to other plant genomes, the proportion of rDNA was found to be very high whereas the proportion of known transposable elements was low. The SSRs identified from BES will be valuable in saturating existing linkage maps and for anchoring physical and genetic maps. The physical map and paired-end reads from BAC clones will also serve as scaffolds to build and validate the whole genome shotgun assembly.</p

PERFORMANCE COMPARISON OF EG-LDPC CODES WITH MAXIMUM LIKELIHOOD ALGORITHM OVER NON-BINARY LDPC CODES

ABSTRACT Error correcting coding has become one essential part in nearly all the modern data transmission and storage systems. Low density parity check (LDPC) codes are a class of linear block code has the superior performance closer to the Shannon&apos;s limit. In this paper two error correcting codes from the family of LDPC codes specifically Euclidean Geometry Low Density Parity Check (EG-LDPC) codes and Nonbinary low density parity check (NB-LDPC) codes are compared in terms of power consumption, number of iterations and other parameters. For better performance of EG-LDPC codes, Maximum Likelihood (ML) Algorithm was proposed. NB-LDPC codes can provide better error correcting performance with an average of 10 to 30 iterations but has high decoding complexity which can be improve by EG-LDPC code

Pseudogenes and Their Genome-Wide Prediction in Plants

Pseudogenes are paralogs generated from ancestral functional genes (parents) during genome evolution, which contain critical defects in their sequences, such as lacking a promoter, having a premature stop codon or frameshift mutations. Generally, pseudogenes are functionless, but recent evidence demonstrates that some of them have potential roles in regulation. The majority of pseudogenes are generated from functional progenitor genes either by gene duplication (duplicated pseudogenes) or retro-transposition (processed pseudogenes). Pseudogenes are primarily identified by comparison to their parent genes. Bioinformatics tools for pseudogene prediction have been developed, among which PseudoPipe, PSF and Shiu’s pipeline are publicly available. We compared these three tools using the well-annotated Arabidopsis thaliana genome and its known 924 pseudogenes as a test data set. PseudoPipe and Shiu’s pipeline identified ~80% of A. thaliana pseudogenes, of which 94% were shared, while PSF failed to generate adequate results. A need for improvement of the bioinformatics tools for pseudogene prediction accuracy in plant genomes was thus identified, with the ultimate goal of improving the quality of genome annotation in plants

Simple sequence repeat marker development from bacterial artificial chromosome end sequences and expressed sequence tags of flax (Linum usitatissimum L.)

Flax is an important oilseed crop in North America and is mostly grown as a fibre crop in Europe. As a self-pollinated diploid with a small estimated genome size of ~370 Mb, flax is well suited for fast progress in genomics. In the last few years, important genetic resources have been developed for this crop. Here, we describe the assessment and comparative analyses of 1,506 putative simple sequence repeats (SSRs) of which, 1,164 were derived from BAC-end sequences (BESs) and 342 from expressed sequence tags (ESTs). The SSRs were assessed on a panel of 16 flax accessions with 673 (58 %) and 145 (42 %) primer pairs being polymorphic in the BESs and ESTs, respectively. With 818 novel polymorphic SSR primer pairs reported in this study, the repertoire of available SSRs in flax has more than doubled from the combined total of 508 of all previous reports. Among nucleotide motifs, trinucleotides were the most abundant irrespective of the class, but dinucleotides were the most polymorphic. SSR length was also positively correlated with polymorphism. Two dinucleotide (AT/TA and AG/GA) and two trinucleotide (AAT/ATA/TAA and GAA/AGA/AAG) motifs and their iterations, different from those reported in many other crops, accounted for more than half of all the SSRs and were also more polymorphic (63.4 %) than the rest of the markers (42.7 %). This improved resource promises to be useful in genetic, quantitative trait loci (QTL) and association mapping as well as for anchoring the physical/genetic map with the whole genome shotgun reference sequence of flax.Peer reviewed: YesNRC publication: Ye