Abstract
Barley is a self-pollinating diploid species with genome size of 5000Mbp and well studied genetically. In November 2005, ca. 420,000 barley ESTs are released on the public databases. BAC libraries are developed each in the US and Japan and the estimation of gene-space has been conducted in the US. In Japan, large scale full length cDNA analyses have been conducted. On the other hand, transformation is still difficult in barley. The high density barley transcript map, which localized ca. 3,000 non-redundant EST markers, has been developed in Okayama University. The gene isolation and selection of these traits are main objectives in the current barley research. A series of recombinant chromosome substitution lines have been developed to isolate agriculturally important genes in Okayama University. To achieve these selection efficiently, the development of genome wide marker selection system is underway.
