BACKGROUND: The IWGSC strategy for construction of the reference sequence of the bread wheat genome is based on first obtaining physical maps of the individual chromosomes. Our aim is to develop and use the physical map for analysis of the organization of the short arm of wheat chromosome 5B (5BS) which bears a number of agronomically important genes, including genes conferring resistance to fungal diseases. RESULTS: A physical map of the 5BS arm (290 Mbp) was constructed using restriction fingerprinting and LTC software for contig assembly of 43,776 BAC clones. The resulting physical map covered ~ 99% of the 5BS chromosome arm (111 scaffolds, N50 = 3.078 Mb). SSR, ISBP and zipper markers were employed for anchoring the BAC clones, and from these 722 novel markers were developed based on previously obtained data from partial sequencing of 5BS. The markers were mapped using a set of Chinese Spring (CS) deletion lines, and F2 and RICL populations from a cross of CS and CS-5B dicoccoides. Three approaches have been used for anchoring BAC contigs on the 5BS chromosome, including clone-by-clone screening of BACs, GenomeZipper analysis, and comparison of BAC-fingerprints with in silico fingerprinting of 5B pseudomolecules of T. dicoccoides. These approaches allowed us to reach a high level of BAC contig anchoring: 96% of 5BS BAC contigs were located on 5BS. An interesting pattern was revealed in the distribution of contigs along the chromosome. Short contigs (200-999 kb) containing markers for the regions interrupted by tandem repeats, were mainly localized to the 5BS subtelomeric block; whereas the distribution of larger 1000-3500 kb contigs along the chromosome better correlated with the distribution of the regions syntenic to rice, Brachypodium, and sorghum, as detected by the Zipper approach. CONCLUSION: The high fingerprinting quality, LTC software and large number of BAC clones selected by the informative markers in screening of the 43,776 clones allowed us to significantly increase the BAC scaffold length when compared with the published physical maps for other wheat chromosomes. The genetic and bioinformatics resources developed in this study provide new possibilities for exploring chromosome organization and for breeding applications.
