Brachypodium
Brachypodium is a newly emerging model plant for the grasses. It is more closely related to the important cereals wheat and barley than rice, which is the current model grass species and the only grass with a sequenced genome. Brachypodium has a relatively small genome of approximately 355 million basepairs, compared to approximately 17 000 million and 4 900 million for wheat and barley respectively. In addition, Brachypodium is a relatively small plant with a short lifecycle, providing an excellent model for small grain studies. Sequencing of the Brachypodium genome is currently underway with completion expected during 2008.
There are about 20,000 Brachypodium EST sequences in the NCBI database as of June 2007. Sequencing of the Brachypodium genome is currently in production.