US scientists paint corn genome sketches

American scientists announced in Washington on February 28th that they successfully sequenced the sketch of the maize genome. This is the second crop genome successfully sequenced by humans. The first crop that was sequenced was rice. With this sketch, scientists can follow the map and crack the various genetic information of corn. Corn variety improvement is expected to enter a fast lane.

Corn genetic information

Richard Wilson, director of the sequencing project and director of the Genome Sequencing Center at Washington University in St. Louis, published the corn genome draft at the 50th annual meeting of the Maize Genetics Conference.

The scientists used the high-yield maize variety codenamed B73 as the research object and completed about 95% of the genome sequencing work. The results showed that the number of genes in the maize genome is 50,000 to 60,000, and the number of base pairs is about 2 billion. In contrast, the rice genome is much smaller, with only about 430 million base pairs.

The Sequencing Team will continue to complete the tail-sweeping work and eventually produce a complete genome sequencing map of the corn. But Wilson said that the sketches actually have basically included the genetic information of corn.

Deposited into the public "Gene Bank"

The Sequencing Team has stored the corn genome sketch information into the Internet Gene Sequencing Public Database “Gene Bank” for free access by scientists from all countries to the Internet. In the future, researchers will be able to more accurately and efficiently study the genome of maize, cultivate new varieties of maize, increase maize yield, and increase the ability of drought resistance and pest resistance of maize.