RIVERSIDE, Calif. -- (www.ucr.edu) -- Dr. Tim Close, professor of genetics in the department of botany and plant sciences at UC Riverside, has been awarded a $2.4 million grant by the National Science Foundation for a project that will facilitate researchers' access to the barley genome to build a fuller understanding of cereal plant traits relevant to agriculture and biology. (A genome is all the DNA in an organism, including its genes.) The title of the research project is "Coupling Expressed Sequences and Bacterial Artificial Chromosome Resources to Access the Barley Genome."

While Close is the Principal Investigator (PI) for the research project, Drs. Tao Jiang and Stefano Lonardi of the department of computer science at UC Riverside are the co-PIs. The other senior personnel for the project is Dr. MingCheng Luo of UC Davis.

The NSF program "Plant Genome Research Project" granted the award for a four-year period starting September 1, 2003. This is the first time UC Riverside has been chosen to lead a project by NSF's Plant Genome Research Project program.

"Barley researchers have made tremendous advances in the past several years," said Close, "with the production of fundamental genomic resources such as a bacterial artificial chromosome library now being used worldwide, several mapping populations, and a microarray representing nearly 22,000 genes. But still, much remains to be done to couple these resources to make it simple for anyone to access the barley genome. In a nutshell, that is the aim of our project -- to simplify for everyone. Indeed, by easing the distribution of information, our project will help extend the knowled
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Contact: Iqbal Pittalwala
iqbal@citrus.ucr.edu
909-787-2645
University of California - Riverside
12-Aug-2003

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