FAO Forum Conf 13 (Genetic Resources)

[For further information on the Electronic Forum on Biotechnology in Food and Agriculture see Forum website.
Note, participants are assumed to be speaking on their own behalf, unless they state otherwise.]

-----Original Message-----
From: Biotech-Mod1
Sent: 15 June 2005 18:04
To: 'biotech-room1@mailserv.fao.org'
Subject: 53: Re: Establishing a universal molecular marker data base

This is Kioumars Ghamkhar from Australia, again.

In support of Marilyn Warburton's suggestion, I think coordination of using different markers by different labs around the world to characterize a specific germplasm/species by an organisation such as FAO or IPGRI will be a great achievement. These data can be stored and analysed by IPGRI in collaboration with those researchers, after collecting all data. We should not worry about different results from different datasets. What is important is the combined analysis that gives us an almost consensus on all the data.

In terms of using single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs), although it is a good idea for wheat or maize it is not a good idea for other not very well-known and newly introduced crops because you will need heaps of sequencing work to have access to SNPs.

Also, supporting, we should not focus only on the protein-coding regions of DNA or markers such as microsatellites that only focus on particular parts of DNA. Because non-coding regions are not necessarily (so-called) junk DNA, we must use techniques such as AFLP and particularly its fluorescent technique which gives us up to 300 bands for each sample (it is a huge source of data). To prove how important the non-coding regions of DNA are, I draw your attention to the fact that coding regions are just "functional needles in a genomic haystack" (Bofkin, L. and S. Whelan. 2004. Functional needles in a genomic haystack. Heredity, 92, 363-364). Also, many "conserved non-genic sequences (CNGs)" have proved to be more conserved between genomes than protein coding sequences, leading to some valuable clues to evolution. More evidence? One study reports that parts of the non-coding DNA may be involved in embryonic development (Peaston A.E. et al. 2004. Retrotransposons regulate host genes in mouse oocytes and preimplantation embryos. Developmental Cell, 7. 597 - 606).

Dr Kioumars Ghamkhar
Research Associate
Centre for Legumes in Mediterranean Agriculture (CLIMA)
University of Western Australia
35 Stirling Highway
Crawley WA 6009
Australia
Voice: 61 8 6488 7120
Fax: 61 8 6488 1140
E-mail: kioumars (at) cyllene.uwa.edu.au

[Note, for those of you who are not aware of it and might like to subscribe, we would like to inform you that FAO has been producing a free e-mail newsletter (2-3 pages long, sent roughly once a month) called FAO-BiotechNews since January 2002. It contains news and event items that are relevant to applications of biotechnology in food and agriculture in developing countries (such as items on this e-mail conference !!). The items focus on the activities of FAO, of other United Nations agencies or organs and of the 15 research centres supported by the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research. Update 7 for the year 2005 is due to be posted in the next few days. To subscribe to receive FAO-BiotechNews (i.e. the English language version), send an e-mail to mailserv@mailserv.fao.org with the following one-line text message:
subscribe FAO-BiotechNews-L

To receive FAO-BiotechNews-Fr (i.e the French version), do the same except the message should read:
subscribe FAO-BiotechNews-Fr-L

To receive FAO-BiotechNews-Esp (i.e the Spanish version), do the same except the message should read:
subscribe FAO-BiotechNews-Esp-L

Previous Updates (48 have been posted so far) can be retrieved by e-mail (instructions are given in the Welcome message people get when first subscribing) or the items can be viewed at http://www.fao.org/biotech/news_list.asp?Cat=131 (news) or http://www.fao.org/biotech/events_list.asp?Cat=133 (events)...Moderator]

Return to Archives of Conference 13 or go to the main Forum pages. Note: you must join the Forum to participate in these discussions.