Wild plants can contribute valuable genes to their domesticated relatives. Fertility barriers and a lack of genomic resources have hindered the effective use of crop-wild introgressions. An international research team led by the IPK Leibniz Institute constructed a pangenome of barley's closest wild relative, Hordeum bulbosum. The study is published today in the journal Nature.
Wild relatives of cultivated plants are a vital source of genetic diversity for improving crops and provide a valuable reservoir of resistance against biotic and abiotic stressors. Although their value has been recognized for decades, technological obstacles have long hindered their exploration. Thanks to advances in high-throughput genomic research, the same tools can now be used in crops and their wild relatives.
An international research team led by the IPK Leibniz Institute studied structural genome evolution in barley (Hordeum vulgare) and Hordeum bulbosum. For this study, Dr. Frank Blattner collected H. bulbosum genotypes in natural populations all over the Mediterranean, which, combined with accessions from genebanks, resulted in a panel of 263 diverse genotypes. This collection comprises both diploid and tetraploid cytotypes. After analyzing their population structure, the research team assembled and annotated ten reference-quality chromosome-scale genomes of bulbous barleys.
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