Jellen et al. Nontechnical Summary Jellen, E. N., H. W. Rines, S. L. Fox, D. W. Davis, R. L. Phillips, and B. S. Gill. In the cereal oat, where this genetic knowledge has lagged behind that in the more common cereals wheat and corn, we have recently succeeded in bringing together several technical advances to produce and characterize a set of genetic lines that are key to developing an understanding of how the individual pieces of genetic information or genes are arranged along the oat chromosomes.
Chromosomes are the physical structures in each cell of each organism that carry the genes.
The genetic lines we have developed are each missing one chromosome of the 21 pairs. Special staining techniques for identifying the individual chromosomes in cells in a microscope preparation enabled us to identify each chromosome and tell which one is missing in each of our special oat lines. By associating which genes or pieces of DNA are not present in lines missing different chromosomes, we can tell which genes are located on which chromosomes. This knowledge assists the efforts of geneticists and breeders to introduce new genes or find favorable combinations of genes for improved disease resistance, productivity, and improved grain composition in oat.