The Investigation of Flowering Control in Late/Rare Flowering Lolium Perenne

Flowering in Lolium perenne (perennial ryegrass) results in reduced digestibility and its inhibition would enhance forage quality. Flowering regulation has been well studied in Arabidopsis thaliana (Simpson and Dean, 2002) and orthologs of Arabidopsis flowering genes underlying heading date Quantitative Trait Loci (QTL) have been identified in rice (Yano, M et al., 2000). However it is not clear yet how universally applicable such studies are to Lolium. The project goals are to characterise the gene expression profiles of late/rare flowering L. perenne plants to determine factors affecting flowering and to map the genes involved in the flowering process. Initial studies, reported here, have focussed on the ability of 6 plant lines from the Oak Park breeding programme, previously identified as rare or non-flowering under natural day length conditions, to flower in controlled environments

Construction and Exploitation of a Bacterial Artificial Chromosome (BAC) Library for \u3cem\u3eLolium Perenne\u3c/em\u3e (Perennial Ryegrass)

BAC libraries are an important tool in genomics, enabling physical maps, genome sequencing, marker development and map based cloning strategies. A BAC library has therefore been generated for the temperate grass species Lolium perenne (perennial ryegrass) which compliments an existing BAC library of the closely related species, Festuca pratensis also generated by IGER. Moreover the L. perenne BAC library will provide a useful tool for grass comparative genomics to compliment the existing BAC libraries of cereal crops including rice, wheat, barley, Sorghum and maize. In particular it will allow a comparison of micro-synteny between this large genome forage crop species and the model small genome monocot species Orzya sativa

Screening of Perennial Grasses and a Mutant Maize Collection by Fourier-Transformed InfraRed (FTIR) Spectroscopy for Improved Biofuel Traits

Currently the potential of biomass crops, including grasses, is limited because most species have not been bred for this purpose. However traits such as lignification, phenolic cross-linking and carbohydrate accessibility, which are also important for nutritive quality in forage grasses, can affect potential biofuel quality in applications such as combustion, fast-pyrolysis or fermentation. A collection of Lolium and Festuca species known to exhibit a range of lignin, cell wall phenolic and carbohydrate concentrations have been used to test optimum characteristics for biofuel processing. This collection formed a “calibration” set for subsequent high through-put FTIR chemical screening of additional plant lines: (1) A set of Lolium-Festuca substitution lines, in which L. perenne chromosomes or chromosome segments are substituted by homoeologous regions of F. pratensis, that provide the potential to physically map biofuel traits to an individual chromosome or chromosome segment; (2) A maize transposon (Robertson’s Mutator) induced mutant collection, which provides the potential to identify gene sequences underlying important biochemical traits linked to biofuel as determined by FTIR analysis

The Identification of Genetic Synteny Between \u3ci\u3eLolium Perenne\u3c/i\u3e Chromosome 7 and Rice Chromosome 6 Genomic Regions that have Major Effects on Heading-Date

Comparative genetic mapping between plant species has established that there has been a conservation of genomic organisation which reflects evolutionary relationships. The genetic mapping of L. perenne has identified such syntenic relationships with both the Triticeae and rice. The recent publication of the complete sequence of the rice genome has allowed these relationships to be analysed more closely and has raised the possibility of using the rice genome as a template for chromosome landing-based gene identification in related non-model species. The aim of the present work was to map particular markers and genes associated with heading-date in rice in L. perenne in order to test this comparative genomics approach

Different Ways of Reading, or Just Making the Right Noises?

What does reading look like? Can learning to read be reduced to the acquisition of a set of isolable skills, or proficiency in reading be equated with the independence of the solitary, silent reader of prose fiction? These conceptions of reading and reading development, which figure strongly in educational policy, may appear to be simple common sense. But both ethnographic data and evidence from literary texts suggest that such paradigms offer, at most, a partial and ahistorical picture of reading. An important dimension, neglected in the dominant paradigms, is the irreducibly social quality of reading practices

Introgression Mapping in The Grasses

Key points Lolium perenne/Festuca pratensis hybrids and their derivatives provide an ideal system for intergeneric introgression. The Lolium perenne/Festuca pratensis system is being exploited to elucidate genome organisation in the grasses, determination of the genetic control of target traits and the isolation of markers for MAS in breeding programmes. The potential of the system as an aid to contig the Lolium and Festuca genomes and for gene isolation is discussed

Mass and Angular Momentum Transfer in the Massive Algol Binary RY Persei

We present an investigation of H-alpha emission line variations observed in the massive Algol binary, RY Per. We give new radial velocity data for the secondary based upon our optical spectra and for the primary based upon high dispersion UV spectra. We present revised orbital elements and an estimate of the primary's projected rotational velocity (which indicates that the primary is rotating 7 times faster than synchronous). We use a Doppler tomography algorithm to reconstruct the individual primary and secondary spectra in the region of H-alpha, and we subtract the latter from each of our observations to obtain profiles of the primary and its disk alone. Our H-alpha observations of RY Per show that the mass gaining primary is surrounded by a persistent but time variable accretion disk. The profile that is observed outside-of-eclipse has weak, double-peaked emission flanking a deep central absorption, and we find that these properties can be reproduced by a disk model that includes the absorption of photospheric light by the band of the disk seen in projection against the face of the star. We developed a new method to reconstruct the disk surface density distribution from the ensemble of H-alpha profiles observed around the orbit, and this method accounts for the effects of disk occultation by the stellar components, the obscuration of the primary by the disk, and flux contributions from optically thick disk elements. The resulting surface density distribution is elongated along the axis joining the stars, in the same way as seen in hydrodynamical simulations of gas flows that strike the mass gainer near trailing edge of the star. This type of gas stream configuration is optimal for the transfer of angular momentum, and we show that rapid rotation is found in other Algols that have passed through a similar stage.Comment: 39 pages, 12 figures, ApJ in press, 2004 June 20 issu