In case you’ve been wondering what I’ve been doing at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory since joining this past July, I can now share the gory details. On Tuesday, the NSF announced the Maize Genome Project, as a collaboration between Washington University at St. Louis Genome Sequencing Center (WUGSC), Arizona Genome Institute, and us. I’m the project lead for the CSHL phase, which involves analyzing and annotating the genome.
At about 2.5 billion bases, the maize genome is about 6 times as large as the rice genome, and about 80% repetitive. This makes it an extremely difficult genome to sequence. Since the estimated 50,000 maize genes lie in the more unique regions (most of the repetitive region is junk DNA), we will regularly need to analyze and annotate the genome to ensure that we’re targeting them.
Read the NSF press release for more paltry details like, why we’re doing this, the scientific, agricultural, and economic impact this will have, how much money we’re getting (cha-ching!), and how long it will take.
