The majority of known plant resistance genes encode proteins with conserved nucleotidebinding sites and leucine-rich repeats (NBS-LRR). Degenerate primers based on conserved NBS-LRR motifs were used to amplify analogues of resistance genes fromthe dicot sugar beet. Along with a cDNA library screen, the PCR screen identified 27 genomic and 12 expressed NBS-LRR RGAs (nlRGAs) sugar beet clones. The clones were classified into three subfamilies based on nucleotide sequence identity. Sequence analyses suggested that point mutations, such as nucleotide substitutions and nsertion/deletions, are probably the primary source of diversity of sugar beet nlRGAs. A phylogenetic analysis revealed an ancestral relationship among sugar beet nlRGAs and resistance genes fromvarious angiospermspecies. One group appeared to share the same common ancestor as Prf, Rx, RPP8, and Mi, whereas the second group originated fromthe ancestral gene from which 12C1, Xa1, and Cre3 arose. The predicted protein products of the nlRGAs isolated in this study are all members of the non-TIR-type resistance gene subfamily and share strong sequence and structural similarities with non-TIR-type resistance proteins. No representatives of the TIR-type RGAs were detected either by PCR amplification using TIR typespecific primers or by in silico screening of more than 16,000 sugar beet ESTs. These findings suggest that TIR type of RGAs is absent fromthe sugar beet genome. The possible evolutionary loss of TIR type RGAs in the sugar beet is discussed.

A seed genetic model with embryo, endosperm, cytoplasmic and maternal effects and genotype

Mutation (substitution, deletion, insertion, etc.) in nucleotide acid causes the maximal sequence lengths of exact match (MALE) between paralogous members from a duplicate event to become shorter during evolution. In this work, MALE changes between members of 26 gene families from four representative species (Arabidopsis thaliana, Oryza sativa, Mus musculus and Homo sapiens) were investigated. Comparative study of paralogous' MALE and amino acid substitution rate (dA<0.5) indicated that a close relationship existed between them. The results suggested that MALE could be a sound evolutionary scale for the divergent time for paralogous genes during their early evolution. A reference table between MALE and divergent time for the four species was set up, which would be useful widely, for large-scale genome alignment and comparison. As an example, detection of large-scale duplication events of rice genome based on the table was illustrated.

Motivation: It was found that high accuracy splicing-site recognition of rice (Oryza sativa L.) DNA sequence is especially difficult. We described a new method for the splicing-site recognition of rice DNA sequences. Method: Based on the intron in eukaryotic organisms conforming to the principle of GT-AG, we used support vector machines (SVM) to predict the splicing sites. By machine learning, we built a model and used it to test the effect of the test data set of true and pseudo splicing sites. Results: The prediction accuracy we obtained was 87.53% at the true 5' end splicing site and 87.37% at the true 3' end splicing sites. The results suggested that the SVM approach could achieve higher accuracy than the previous approaches.

An ancient genome duplication (PPP1) that predates divergence of the cereals has recently been recognized. We report here another potentially older large-scale duplication (PPP2) event that predates monocot-dicot divergence in the genome of rice (Oryza sativa L.), as inferred from the age distribution of pairs of duplicate genes based on recent genome data for rice. Our results suggest that paleopolyploidy was widespread and played an important role in the evolution of rice.