Researchers at the University of California, Riverside now will be able to advance their work on sequencing the barley genome (complete genetic blueprint) and breeding new barley varieties thanks to a two-year $1 million grant they received from the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Cooperative State Research, Education, and Extension Service (USDA/CSREES). To sequence the barley genome, IIGB Professor and Geneticist Timothy Close in the Botany & Plant Sciences department and CEPCEB Associate Professor Stefano Lonardi in the Computer Science & Engineering department will use IIGB’s recently-acquired Illumina Genome Analyzer IIA, which can generate billions of bases of high-quality DNA sequences per run. The goal of the project is to identify genes that control important traits such as yield, disease resistance, and food and malt quality, and select the best trait combinations they wish to see emerge in new varieties.