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Hi,
I'm Stephanie Pearl,
and I'm a researcher at
the University of Georgia.
Today, I will be giving you an
overview about some of the ways
recent advances in DNA
sequencing technology
has impacted agriculture.
You may notice that some of the
topics that I touch on today
are covered in much more detail
in some of the other lectures
within the agricultural genetics
section of the Henry Stewart talks.
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So I will begin with an overview.
And I'll begin by giving an
introduction in which I first
talk about some of the
world's most important crops,
and introduce them in the
context of breeding and genomics.
And then I'll delve into a
little bit more information
on how one goes about
conducting a sequencing project.
And then, how does one actually
apply the sequencing data
to advancing breeding populations?
And then, I'll conclude with
some thoughts looking forward.
So to begin.
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Pictured here is a list of 12
the world's most important crops.
And this is based on
total area harvested.
And I've listed their genome sizes.
So for example, if you look
at ground nut or peanut,
you could see that has a
genome 3 billion base pairs.
And I've also listed the ploidy
level, or the total number
of copies of chromosomes
in each of these species.
If you look at potato,
you can actually
see that different individuals have
variable ploidy levels, starting
from diploid all the
way up to hexaploid.
And I've also listed the
top production areas.
So there's quite a bit of
information listed on this slide.
So you may wish to pause for
a moment to take it all in.
Really, there are just a few
points that I wish to make here.
First of all, these are
the 12 most important crops
as of the year 2012.
And this ordering
has remain relatively
unchanged in the past 50 years.
Therefore, because of the
importance of these crops,
they have been the focus
of genomics analyses.
And so here, with the red stars
next to each one of the crops,
I've indicated which species
have genome sequence data.
So what about wheat, sugar
cane, sunflower, and peanut?
Why don't they have whole
genome sequence data yet?
Well, this is currently
a work in progress.
And as you look at the genome size
and ploidy level of these species,
you can see that compared
to the other ones,
they're a bit more
unwieldy to deal with.
So how is genomics data used to
advance and improve these crops?
Well, before I answer
that question, let's first
consider how traditional
breeding proceed.
