Lesson 11 - Some practice questions

This section doesn't have any examples or explanations. The questions below don't have any right or wrong answer, but hopefully they will provide you not only a chance to try out all the things you've learned, but also provide you with example problem areas for which these databases are appropriate and useful resources. Because the databases integrate so many different types of information, they can be powerful tools for solving problems that span or affect multiple disciplines by making it easier to follow this "information trail". And these don't need to be treated as stand-alone resources - data you uncover in one database could be very instrumental in extracting information from another. If you have any other scenarios in which you have found these databases useful in your research, we would love to add them to the list, just let us know.

1. Find a QTL study in maize that interests you. What markers are associated with the QTL? Based on these markers, can you predict where similar QTLs might be located in rice? Can this be extended to oat? If so, does the GrainGenes database support the hypothesis of a QTL in oat located in that region?

2. Pick a morphological marker in rice. Do you think it's in a region conserved with maize? Are there any likely candidates for the orthologous locus in the maize database?

3. What genetic stocks would be useful for studying the arginine synthesis pathway (or any other pathway of your choice) in soybean? Do these stocks have other useful/detrimental traits?

4. What cultivars performed well (e.g. yielded better than the check) in the wheat nursery trial in Hokkaido, Japan? How did these cultivars compare to each other and/or the check in other traits and other locations? How do they compare to other cultivars with similar pedigrees?

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