Score your own maize phenotypes in our 'Fields of Dreams'!

Panzean Press Release, Mar 8, 2007

"If you build it they will come..."    Well, we have built it:

The ultimate germplasm resource to date for localizing QTLs in maize!

It is a nested association mapping (NAM) population consisting of 5000 RILs from 25 families, with 200 RILs per family, all being genotyped at 1500 SNP loci.  The families were generated by crossing 25 diverse maize inbred lines with B73 as a common parent.  Additionally, the well-known IBM mapping population is included as the 26^th family.  This summer we will be planting out all of these RILs in three locations (Raleigh, NC; Ithaca, NY; Champaign-Urbana, IL).  The parental lines are being sequenced over the next year and a half, and these data will make it possible to analyze all populations as one unified experiment, potentially with gene-level QTL resolution.

We invite interested maize researchers to score their own phenotypes of interest in one or more of these fields.

Our only stipulation is that your data set must be deposited in our project database, Aztec, where it will be held privately for two years (members of the Panzea group will not be allowed to analyze it either, without prior permission from you), and then released to the public via www.panzea.org.

We also have extensive experience in creating barcoding tools for phenotyping, and can provide help with this.  For further details or to arrange your phenotyping visit(s), please contact:

• Ed Buckler, USDA-ARS/Cornell University (esb33@cornell.edu),
• Jim Holland, USDA-ARS/North Carolina State University (James_Holland@ncsu.edu), or
• Torbert Rocheford, Univ. of Illinois (trochefo@uiuc.edu).