A comparative physical map of the AA genome (Oryza sativa) and the BB genome (O. punctata) was constructed by aligning a physical map of O. punctata, deduced from 63,942 BAC end sequences (BESs) and 34,224 fingerprints, onto the O. sativa genome sequence. The level of conservation of each chromosome between the two species was determined by calculating a ratio of BES alignments. The alignment result suggests more divergence of intergenic and repeat regions in comparison to gene-rich regions. Further, this characteristic enabled localization of heterochromatic and euchromatic regions for each chromosome of both species. The alignment identified 16 locations containing expansions, contractions, inversions, and transpositions. By aligning 40% of the punctata BES on the map, 87% of the punctata FPC map covered 98% of the O. sativa genome sequence. The genome size of O. punctata was estimated to be 8% larger than that of O. sativa with individual chromosome differences of 1.5-16.5%. The sum of expansions and contractions observed in regions .500 kb were similar, suggesting that most of the contractions/ expansions contributing to the genome size difference between the two species are small, thus preserving the macro-collinearity between these species, which diverged $2 million years ago. C OMPARATIVE genome analysis is proving to be an excellent tool, not only to discover genes and understand their functions, but also to unravel the evolutionary relationships between species. Since related species are derived from recent common ancestors, it comes as no surprise that in both dicots and monocots extensive genetic collinearity was found when related species were mapped using common RFLP probe sets (Bonierbale et al. 1988;Hulbert et al. 1990;Ahn and Tanksley 1993;Jena et al. 1994). While extensive collinearity seems to be limited to the genus level among dicots (Tanksley et al.1988), sufficient collinearity exists to allow rough alignment of genetic maps across entire genomes throughout the entire cereal clade (Moore et al. 1995). The complete sequences of the model organisms Arabidopsis and rice (Arabi- Although rice is considered a model plant and placed at the center of the cereal crop syntenic circle (Moore et al. 1995; Gale and Devos 1998a,b;Devos 2005), only a few genomewide comparative analyses as yet have been performed using the rice genome sequence as a reference. The sorghum genome was compared to the rice genome sequence using two sorghum physical maps integrated with genetic markers and BAC hybridization data (Bowers et al. 2005). Various local rearrangements between other cereals and rice have been reported in sequence-level comparisons using the rice genome sequence as the reference (Chen et al. 1998;Goff et al. 2002;Bennetzen and Ma 2003;Sorrells Sequence data from this article have been deposited with the EMBL/GenBank Data Libraries under accession nos. CW502583-CW509125, CW514009-539178, CW620733-CW624836, CW628185-633039, CW672722-CW676096, CW691361-692844, CW748472-CW754418, CW775494-CW77843...