Genomic Resources for Asparagales

Enormous genomic resources have been developed for plants in the monocot order Poales; however, it is not known how useful these resources will be for other economically important monocots. Asparagales are a monophyletic order sister to class Commelinanae that carries Poales, and is the second most economically important monocot order. Development of genomic resources for and their application to Asparagales are challenging because of huge nuclear genomes and the relatively long generation times required to develop segregating families. We synthesized a normalized eDNA library of onion (Allium cepa) and produced II ,008 unique expressed sequence tags (ESTs) for comparative genomic analyses of Asparagales and Poales. Alignments of onion ESTs, Poales ESTs, and genomic sequences from rice were used to design oligonucleotide primers amplifying genomic regions from asparagus, garlic, and onion. Sequence analyses of these genomic regions revealed microsatellites, insertions/deletions, and single nucleotide polymorphisms for comparative mapping of rice and Asparagales vegetables. Initial mapping revealed no obvious synteny at the recombinationallevel between onion and rice, indicating that genomic resources developed for Poales may not be applicable to the monocots as a whole. Genomic analyses of Asparagales would greatly benefit from EST sequencing and deep-coverage, large-insert genomic libraries of representative small-genome model species within the "higher" and "lower" Asparagales, such as asparagus and orchid, respectively.