biotech tools

Barley is a wonderfully versatile cereal grain with a rich nutlike flavor and an appealing chewy, pasta-like consistency. Barley is a very good source of fiber and selenium. It also serves as a good source of the minerals phosphorus, copper and manganese. With these nutritious value, recent study show that barley seems as the breakfast cereal is good for prevention of breast cancer, heart failure, protective actions against cardiovascular risk factors and childhood asthma, also patients with type 2 diabetes (The George Mateljan Foundation, 2009). Hence, it is important to investigate plant breed to create the next generation of crops with enrich cultivated gene pools by incorporating favourable alleles, genes or gene complexes from wild relatives.

Physical mapping become one of the important tools in order to create the next generation of crops. A physical map is an assemblage of overlapping DNA fragments that are ordered and oriented and span each of the chromosome in a genome (Hartwell et al., 2008). A broad definition would say that it consists in placing nuceotidic sequences with respect to a DNA matrix. For instance, placing a gene responsible for a disease on the chromosome in which it is contained. More generally, physical mapping concerns any nucleotides sequence (the probe) which position onto a longer nucleotides sequence (the target) has to be known. Cutting DNA is performed by restriction enzymes. The resulting fragments are usually inserted into bacterial to generate the clone libraries. This allows for their conservation and mass production of DNA. Then, a physical mapping technique is important to reorganize the clone fragments in the corresponding order on the chromosomes they come from.