Šimková Group

     The major aim of our group is to dissect complex genomes of small grain cereals at both structural and functional level. Our approaches frequently exploit our lab’s unique pipeline for chromosome and nuclei flow sorting and a well-established technique of optical mapping. Capitalising on these technologies, we aided in generating reference genomes of several crop species, contributed to cloning a Russian wheat aphid resistance gene and revealed the fine structure and dynamic transcription of ribosomal DNA loci in bread wheat and barley. Besides, we adopted the chromatin-conformation-capture technique Hi-C to study chromatin packaging during the cell cycle and, complemented by a variety of epigenetic techniques, to map cis-regulatory elements controlling transcription during barley development.