Date: Apr 20, 2015. Jeff Glaubitz: The Maize Rare Alleles Project: Biology & Bioinformatics

Jeff Glaubitz is a Senior Research Associate and the Project Manager of Panzea - the NSF Maize Diversity Project.

The NSF project Biology Of Rare Alleles In Maize And Its Wild Relatives (Ed Buckler, PI) is combining the power of population genetic and molecular models with quantitative genetics to elucidate the relative contributions of rare versus common alleles to phenotypic variation and evolution. We are taking advantage of recent advances in high-throughput genotyping and phenotyping methodologies to identify the key biological attributes of variants (genome annotations) that will allow us to better predict the functional effects of rare alleles in Zea. This information will then be used to accelerate crop improvement either through more accurate genomic selection or via future genome editing approaches. We hope to enhance the effectiveness of plant breeding by improving our ability to identify, predict, and select on the effects of rare variants, both deleterious and beneficial. In this talk I will give an overview of the biological goals of this project and the various bioinformatic tools that are being developed to achieve these goals, with an emphasis on TASSEL.

Date: April 20, 2015
Time: 11:00 AM
Location: Weill hall, Room 321
Slides

Date: Apr 28, 2014. Robert Bukowski: HapMap3: large-scale genotyping for Zea mays

Robert Bukowski is a Senior Research Associate at the BRC Bioinformatics Facility on campus.

The maize HapMap project, currently at its third release, focuses on capturing allelic variation, including rare alleles, across a highly diverse set of maize germplasm. It is a part of ongoing effort in the pan-zea community to identify variants responsible for complex trait variation. I will present computational techniques we use to characterize genotypes of about 1,000 maize lines from Illumina whole-genome sequencing data.

Date: Apr 28, 2014
Time: 11:00 AM
Location: Weill hall, Room 221

Slides