Abstract
In the past few years, data on the general sequence organisation in about a dozen or so higher plant genomes have been published. These studies have involved the classification of DNA into repeated or non-repeated sequences by renaturation kinetics and measurement of the lengths and arrangement of the sequences in the non repeated classes. Sequence organisation patterns have been described but the significance of these patterns is still a mystery. Our laboratory has studied the genomes of wheat, rye, barley and oats — four cereal species that have diverged from a common ancestor (Flavell, Rimpau and Smith, 1977). Our approach has frequently been an interspecies, comparative one because we believed that it would be instructive to understand not only the present day structures of these genomes but also the ways in which the genomes have evolved. A number of general concepts about genome structure and evolution have emerged from these studies. We therefore thought it would be useful at this workshop to outline these concepts and some of the evidence supporting them. In addition, we have drawn the ideas together in presenting a general scheme for the evolution of much of the DNA in these complex plant genomes. The conclusions drawn from our cereal genome studies, and the evolutionary scheme, should be applicable to the genomes of other higher plants.
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References
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© 1980 Plenum Press, New York
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Flavell, R., Rimpau, J., Smith, D.B., O’Dell, M., Bedbrook, J.R. (1980). The Evolution of Plant Genome Structure. In: Leaver, C.J. (eds) Genome Organization and Expression in Plants. NATO Advanced Study Institutes Series, vol 29. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4613-3051-6_4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4613-3051-6_4
Publisher Name: Springer, Boston, MA
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