family in the Brassica genome sequences by computational approach. The MITE family showed a total of 264bp length including 36bp terminal inverted repeats and remained 2bp (TA) targets it eduplication by its insertion. By searching the genome database of Brassica species, 516, 227, and 15 members were identified from 470Mbp of Brassica oleraceae, 154Mbp of B.rapa and 15Mbp of B.napus, respectively, indicating that there are approximately 692, 760, 1235 copies in B.oleracea, B.rapa and B.napus genomes,respectively. A total of 225 relatively intact MITE members, 146,68, and 11 members, which showed >80% sequence similarity and sequence coverage were identified and retrieved for MITE analysis from B.oleracea, B.rapa and B.napus genomes, respectively. Out of 225 MITE family members 159 having full structure of MITE and 66 having the truncated end either in right TIR or left TIR. Insertion polymorphism due to insertion or non-insertion of MITEs showed high level of polymorphism among accessions intra and inter species of Brassica. The new MITE would provide abetter tool for study molecular breeding in Brassica species and also helpful to understand their contribution in evolution and diversification of the highly duplicated Brassica genome.

Perilla is a genus as a member of the mint family Lamiaceae which is known to contain lots of volatile metabolite. Perilla has been called as ‘deulkae’ indicating ‘wild sesame’ that means it has been maintained in Korea with long history. It has been very friendly used as edible oil and as fresh leaf vegetable. Perilla oil is valued for its medicinal benefit because it contains best amounts of unsaturated fatty acids, especially for the alpha-linolenic acid, known to omega-3 fatty acid, among all of the plant oils. It also include many beneficial phytochemicals. However, little study is conducted on their genetics. Here, we announce construction of well normalized and full length enriched-perilla cDNA library from a whole plant of one cultivar ‘Youngho-deulkae’ and their sequence characterization to provide useful resources for genetics, breeding and metabolite engineering. By sequencing of 5,760 cDNA clones, we 5,438 high quality EST sequences. Sequence trimming and assembly resulted 3,995 unigenes which consists 1,004 contigs and 2,991 singletones. Unigenes that showed little homology at the DNA sequence level with known genes in other plants even though they showed similarity at the protein domain level based on BLASTN, BLASTX, and TBLASTX. This study may provide good resources for initiation of further genomics, comparative genomics, functional genomics such as metabolic engineering and molecular breeding.

Barley landraces harbor significantly higher genetic diversity than modern cultivars. Diversity of agronomic and morphological traits was investigated for 386 accessions of Korean landrace barley which were back-introduced from Okayama University, Japan. Among the accessions, 279 were covered barley and 89 naked barley. Seeds were sowed in late October and major growth characteristics were investigated at maturity and after harvest. The traits evaluated exhibited higher variation with respect to the CV, ranging from 47 to 60. The trait exhibiting the greatest variation was flag leaf width (FLW, CV=60 with 2.8x difference between minimum 0.6 and maximum 1.7). Those traits exhibiting least variation were heading date (HD, CV=47.2 with 31 days difference between the earliest and the latest) and seed number per spike (SNS, CV= 48.9 with 2.8x difference between minimum 36 and maximum 72). The other eight traits [maturity date (MD, CV= 53.7), culm length (CL, CV= 55.4), flag leaf length (FLL, CV= 51.6), spike length (SL, CV= 54.3), awn length (AL, CV= 54.4), whole spike length (WSL, CV= 52.9), spike density (SD, CV= 52.7), seed rows of spike (SRS, CV= 50.1)] were intermediate in their level of variation with respect to the CV. The first, second and third principal components explained about 30.3%, 17.0% and 13.4% of the total variation of the traits, respectively. The traits which contributed more positively to PC1 were SL, SD, WSL and AL. The traits which contributed more positively to PC2 were SRS and SNS, and those contributed more positively to PC3 were FLL and FLW. The Korean landrace barley accessions contain significantly diverse variation to explore for the improvement of agronomic and morphological traits of current elite cultivars. This work was supported by a grant from Regional Subgenebank Support Program of Rural Development Administration, Republic of Korea.

Seed storage proteins of different solubility were extracted and denatured subunits of each protein were evaluated with malting barley quality parameters. Its been known that each subunit of seed storage protein encoded by each gene and subunit profiles were highly related to end-use quality in cereals. The purpose of this study is to provide selection criteria for high quality malting barleys with aid of bichemical-genetic information. Total 13 regional test lines and three locations (Naju, Jinju, and Jeju) were incorporated in this study. Albumin and hordein were extracted, denatured, and separated in 12% SDS-PAGE. Presence and absence of subunits of each protein were scored. Dendrogram (using XLSTAT program) was constructed to evaluated the relatedness of lines. The correlation between band profiles and quality test were assessed through Agglomerative Hierarchical Clustering (AHC) for statistics analysis. Hordein subunits can be classified into four groups, A, B, C, and D group. In general, hordein fractions contribute higher than albumine to determine malting quality. Specific molecular weight ranges (97.4-31.0, 66.2-31.0, and 45.0-31.0 kDa) of subunits were highly correlated with malting barley quality parameters. The subunit information would be directly incorporated in providing selection criteria for high quality malting barley in the malting barley breeding program.

The objectives of this study were to collect and maintain wild barley accessions and to analyze their phylogenetic relationships among the accessions. Sixty wild barley accessions were collected from Syria (four accessions), Jordan (eight), Afghanistan (six), Iraq (three), Iran (four), Turkey (two), Pakistan (one), Tajikistan (one), Azerbaijan (one), Palestine (fifteen), and unknown area (fifteen). Seeds of the three accessions failed to germinate. Thirty-seven random amplified polymorphic DNA (RAPD) were generated and the phylogenetic relationship of the accessions was analyzed. Large genetic diversity existed among the collections and the collections were classified into 4 groups at a similarity coefficient of about 0.7698. Significant variations were observed within the collections from the same geographical location. The collections have sufficient genetic and morphological diversity for the genetic and phenotyphic analyses of traits associated with tolerance to abiotic stresses such as salt and drought.

Major agronomic and morphological traits of Korean land races of cultivated barley were analyzed. Three hundred sixty-three Korean land races, 69 hull-less and 295 hulled barely, were cultivated at the field of National Honam Agricultural Research Institute at Iksan, Korea. Olbori and Saessalbori were used as control varieties for hulled and hull-less barley, respectively. Traits such as heading date, maturity, plant height and flag leaf length and width were analyzed. Heading date and maturity were variable 22 and 22 days, respectively, among the land races tested. Plant height of land races corresponded to 74 to 174% of that of the control varieties. Flag leaf length and width varied from 87% to 314% and from 57 to 233%, respectively, of that of the control varieties. This result indicates that genetic diversity for agronomic and morphological traits are significantly broad among Korean land races and they could provide valuable genes to improve current elite lines.