The barley physical map – impact of different BAC libraries made of partially digested or randomly sheared genomic DNA

The development of a genome-wide physical map for barley (Hordeum vulgare cv. Morex , genome size=5Gbp) was initiated and coordinated by the International Barley genome sequencing consortium (IBSC, Schulte et al., 2009). To this end ~650,000 BAC clones were fingerprinted via high information content fingerprinting (HICF). These BACs were derived from 6 different BAC libraries (3x HindIII, EcoRI, MboI and random sheared). A total of 570,000 (13X genome coverage) high quality fingerprints were selected and entered into the de novo contig assembly (FPC V9.2). The final contig assembly is composed of almost 10,000 BAC contigs. About 80% of the physical length of the contig assembly was anchored to the genetic map by a highly complex approach taking advantage of a very diverse set of anchoring information. This anchored physical map furthermore provided now the opportunity to test for the library specific contribution and whether any of the libraries performed better and provided an unbiased genome representation. An overview of the status of the work will be presented.