Aquilegia Home | Physical Map | STCs | Publications
a purple and white mimulus flower
Project Progress
Jan 2006, Combined physical map available here.
Oct 2005, A. formosa MboI fingerprinting completed.
Sept 2005, A. formosa HindIII fingerprinting completed.
Aug 2005, A. formosa MboI fingerprinting begins.
Mar 2005, A. formosa HindIII fingerprinting begins.
Oct 2004, Grant awarded.
Collaborators
 Project Objectives
Develop a physical map and STCs of A. formosa to help study adaptation to the environment in the columbine genus, Aquilegia.
Project Phases
CUGI Online Resources
  • Download the STC dataset
  • FASTA and BLAST Servers
Funding
This project is supported by NSF-BE grant No. 0412727.
CUGI Aquilegia Project
Welcome to the CUGI aquilegia project home page. CUGI has partnered with other research institutions to help provide a robust set of genetic resources for the aquilegia community. This project consists of the physical map construction of Aquilegia formosa and BAC-end sequencing in the form of STCs. This Information is made freely available to researchers for basic and applied studies in aquilegia molecular genetics via our web site. Two BAC libraries of A. formosa, digested with HindIII and MboI respectively have been provided to CUGI for use in physical mapping and BAC end-sequencing.

CUGI's Online Aquilegia Resources
All information generated at CUGI is made freely available to researchers for basic and applied studies in Aquilegia molecular genetics. A similarity server is also available for researchers to performBLAST or FASTA homology searches against our Aquilegia STC database.

Background
The evolution of life on earth has been punctuated by numerous examples of adaptive radiation. These dramatic events quickly create a large amount of biodiversity and are evidenced by rapid speciation along with morphological and physiological adaptations to numerous ecological niches. Species in the flowering plant genus Aquilegia have undergone a very recent adaptive radiation and present a unique opportunity to investigate the molecular genetic changes underlying adaptations. Species in this genus have spectacularly different floral morphologies with specializations to different pollinators. In addition, species differ radically in their habitats ranging from coastal forests to desert springs to the high alpine. Because any two species in the genus can be successfully crossed it is possible to dissect the genetic basis for essentially any trait in any species. By developing an array of molecular genetic resources for this genus, this project will provide the infrastructure for a host of studies by a broad community of scientists. All of these studies will be facilitated by the fact that the genome of Aquilegia is among the smallest for a flowering plant at about 350 Mbp. The specific goals of this project are to evaluate the genetic basis of three important traits, morphological adaptation to a specific pollinator, physiological adaptation for flowering time and adaptation to different soil/habitats.