No abstract

SummaryIn wheat, race-speci®c resistance to the fungal pathogen powdery mildew (Blumeria graminis f. sp. tritici ) is controlled by the Pm genes. There are 10 alleles conferring resistance at the Pm3 locus (Pm3a to Pm3j) on chromosome 1AS of hexaploid bread wheat (Triticum aestivum L.). The genome of hexaploid wheat has a size of 1.6 Â 10 10 bp and contains more than 80% of repetitive sequences, making positional cloning dif®cult. Here, we demonstrate that the combined analysis of genomes from wheat species with different ploidy levels can be exploited for positional cloning in bread wheat. We have mapped the Pm3b gene in hexaploid wheat to a genetic interval of 0.97 centimorgan (cM). The diploid T. monococcum and the tetraploid T. turgidum ssp. durum provided models for the A genome of hexaploid wheat and allowed to establish a physical contig spanning the Pm3 locus. Although the haplotypes at the Pm3 locus differed markedly between the three species, a large resistance gene-like family speci®c to wheat group 1 chromosomes was consistently found at the Pm3 locus. A candidate gene for Pm3b was identi®ed using partial sequence conservation between resistant line Chul and T. monococcum cv. DV92. A susceptible Pm3b mutant, carrying a single-base pair deletion in the coding region of the candidate gene was isolated. When tested in a single cell transformation assay, the Pm3b candidate gene conferred race-speci®c resistance to powdery mildew. These results demonstrate that the candidate gene, a member of the coiled-coil nucleotide binding site leucine-rich repeat (NBS-LRR) type of disease resistance genes, is the Pm3b gene.

Sugarcane (Saccharum spp.) is a major crop for sugar and bioenergy production. Its highly polyploid, aneuploid, heterozygous, and interspecific genome poses major challenges for producing a reference sequence. We exploited colinearity with sorghum to produce a BAC-based monoploid genome sequence of sugarcane. A minimum tiling path of 4660 sugarcane BAC that best covers the gene-rich part of the sorghum genome was selected based on whole-genome profiling, sequenced, and assembled in a 382-Mb single tiling path of a high-quality sequence. A total of 25,316 protein-coding gene models are predicted, 17% of which display no colinearity with their sorghum orthologs. We show that the two species, S. officinarum and S. spontaneum, involved in modern cultivars differ by their transposable elements and by a few large chromosomal rearrangements, explaining their distinct genome size and distinct basic chromosome numbers while also suggesting that polyploidization arose in both lineages after their divergence.