Setaria genome sequencing: an overview

Foxtail millet is one of the oldest domesticated diploid C4 Panicoid crops having a comparatively small genome size of approximately 515 Mb, short life cycle, and inbreeding nature. Its two species, Setaria italica (domesticated) and Setaria viridis (wild progenitor), have characteristics that classify them as excellent model systems to examine several aspects of architectural, evolutionary, and physiological importance in Panicoid grasses especially the biofuel crops such as switchgrass and napiergrass. Foxtail millet is a staple crop used extensively for food and fodder in parts of Asia and Africa. In its long history of cultivation, it has been adapted to arid and semi-arid areas of Asia, North Africa, South and North America. Foxtail millet has one of the largest collections of cultivated as well as wild-type germplasm rich with phenotypic variations and hence provides prospects for association mapping and allele-mining of elite and novel variants to be incorporated in crop improvement programs. Most of the foxtail millet accessions can be primarily abiotic stress tolerant particularly to drought and salinity, and therefore exploiting these agronomic traits can enhance its efficacy in marker-aided breeding as well as in genetic engineering for abiotic stress tolerance. In addition, the release of draft genome sequence of foxtail millet would be useful to the researchers worldwide in not only discerning the molecular basis of biomass production in biofuel crops and the methods to improve it, but also for the introgression of beneficial agronomically important characteristics in foxtail millet as well as in related Panicoid bioenergy grasses.

The availability of well-validated informative co-dominant microsatellite markers and saturated genetic linkage map has been limited in foxtail millet (Setaria italica L.). In view of this, we conducted a genome-wide analysis and identified 28 342 microsatellite repeat-motifs spanning 405.3 Mb of foxtail millet genome. The trinucleotide repeats (∼48%) was prevalent when compared with dinucleotide repeats (∼46%). Of the 28 342 microsatellites, 21 294 (∼75%) primer pairs were successfully designed, and a total of 15 573 markers were physically mapped on 9 chromosomes of foxtail millet. About 159 markers were validated successfully in 8 accessions of Setaria sp. with ∼67% polymorphic potential. The high percentage (89.3%) of cross-genera transferability across millet and non-millet species with higher transferability percentage in bioenergy grasses (∼79%, Switchgrass and ∼93%, Pearl millet) signifies their importance in studying the bioenergy grasses. In silico comparative mapping of 15 573 foxtail millet microsatellite markers against the mapping data of sorghum (16.9%), maize (14.5%) and rice (6.4%) indicated syntenic relationships among the chromosomes of foxtail millet and target species. The results, thus, demonstrate the immense applicability of developed microsatellite markers in germplasm characterization, phylogenetics, construction of genetic linkage map for gene/quantitative trait loci discovery, comparative mapping in foxtail millet, including other millets and bioenergy grass species.

Dehydration stress is one of the most important abiotic stresses that adversely influence crop growth and productivity. With the aim to understand the molecular mechanisms underlying dehydration stress tolerance in foxtail millet (Setaria italica L.), a drought tolerant crop, we examined its transcriptome changes at two time points (early and late) of dehydration stress. Two suppression subtractive hybridization (SSH) forward libraries were constructed from 21-day old seedlings of tolerant cv. Prasad at 0.5 and 6h PEG-induced dehydration stress. A total of 327 unique ESTs were identified from both libraries and were classified into 11 different categories according to their putative functions. The plant response against dehydration stress was complex, representing major transcripts involved in metabolism, stress, signaling, transcription regulation, translation and proteolysis. By Reverse Northern (RN) technique we identified the differential expression pattern of 327 transcripts, 86 (about 26%) of which showed > or = 1.7-fold induction. Further the obtained results were validated by quantitative real-time PCR (qRT-PCR) to have a comparative expression profiling of randomly chosen 9 up-regulated transcripts (> or =2.5 fold induction) between cv. Prasad (tolerant) and cv. Lepakshi (sensitive) upon dehydration stress. These transcripts showed a differential expression pattern in both cultivars at different time points of stress treatment as analyzed by qRT-PCR. The possible relationship of the identified transcripts with dehydration tolerance mechanism is discussed. Copyright 2010 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.