The gene distribution of the maize genome

What is it about?

Here we report on the gene distribution of maize that most striking appeared to be highly biased with almost all genes present in 100 kb fragments covering an extremely narrow GC range corresponding to the compositional range of only one human isochore and accounting for only a fraction of the whole genome. This anisotropic gene distribution was remarkably different from the gene distribution previously found in vertebrate genomes.

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Why is it important?

The anisotropic gene distribution of maize was important in the time were the scientific community was mainly investigating the genome organization through genetic mapping and generally thinking that genes were uniformally distributed along chromosomes simply because pericentromeric regions only have a low recombination rate. This study was the first step to demonstrate the contrary with the consequence that genes tend to accumulated in active euchromatine regions far from centromeric and telomeric regions.

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