'Plant Breeding: Sustaining the Future' Abstracts of the XVIth EUCARPIA Congress, Edinburgh, Scotland, 10-14 September 2001 FUNCTIONAL GENOMICS OF SEED GERMINATION IN BARLEY E. POTOKINA, M. WOLF, S. NESEVASULU, W. WESCHKE, W. MICHALEK, L. ALTSCHMIED,  A. GRANER Institute of Plant Genetics and Crop Plant Research (IPK), Corrensstr. 3, 06466 Gatersleben, Germany

The understanding of gene regulation during the process of barley seed germination might provide significant information to our understanding of the malting process. To this end, RNA from two different tissues (embryo and scutellum) and four germination stages was isolated and used to probe a cDNA array comprising some 1,400 barley genes. As a result 40 tissue- and germinating stage-specific transcripts could be determined. Database comparisons revealed that putative functions can be assigned to the majority of those genes. Only 14 cDNAs did not yield significant homologies in a protein database. As a next step, genetic mapping of these differentially expressed genes might be a useful strategy to identify putative candidate genes for malting qtls.