Mapping maize sequences to chromosomes using oat-maize chromosome addition materials.

Oat- (Avena sativa) maize (Zea mays) chromosome additions are produced by crossing maize and oat. During early embryo development maize chromosomes are preferentially eliminated, and oat plants are often recovered that retain a single maize chromosome. Each of the 10 maize chromosomes recently has been isolated as a separate oat-maize addition. We describe here the mapping of 400 maize sequences to chromosomes using polymerase chain reaction and DNA from the oat-maize addition material. Fifty of the sequences were from cloned markers that had been previously mapped by linkage analysis, and our results were consistent with those obtained using Southern-blot analysis. Previously unmapped expressed sequence tags and sequence tagged sites (350) were mapped to chromosomes. Maize gene sequences and expression data are rapidly being accumulated. Coupling this information with positional information from high throughput mapping programs provides plant biologists powerful tools for identifying candidate genes of interest.