Rice Chromosomes Offer Surprising Discovery

MADISON - Jan 12/04 - SNS - Inside the chromosomes of rice, an international team of scientists were able to expose and sequence a genetic domain that was previously believed to be barren, known as the centromere.

The centromere is critical to all chromosomes, and is typically composed of enormous strands of indecipherable, non-coding DNA, that were discovered to contain active genes.

The team is led by Jiming Jiang, a professor of horticulture at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and C. Robin Buell of the Institute for Genomic Research in Rockville, Maryland.

This breakthrough promises to help fill in a key genetic void and increase the understanding of chromosomes, which are the molecular structures that are found in all living cells and are the carriers of hereditary information, as well as allowing cell division and replication.

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