An international team of 80 scientists from 12 different countries led by
the Leibniz Institute of Plant Genetics and Crop Plant Research (IPK) has
reported a pangenome of barley, providing insights into the crop's disease
resistance, architecture, starch mobilization, and the hairiness of a
rudimentary appendage to the grain. The results were published in Nature.



The pangenome, which is a collection of annotated genome sequences of
multiple individuals of a species was studied in barley. The barley
pangenome comprises long-read sequence assemblies of 76 wild and
domesticated genomes and short-read sequence data of 1,315 genotypes. The
expanded catalog of sequence variation in the crop includes structurally
complex loci that are rich in gene copy number variation and that control
certain traits. To show the pangenome's utility, the researchers focused on
a few loci - Mla, HvTB1, amy1_1, HvSRH1 - and the traits that they control,
including disease resistance, plant architecture, starch mobilization, and
the hairiness of a rudimentary appendage to the grain.



Barley is one of the top five crops in the world today, and its importance
may increase in the future as the crop can tolerate harsh and marginal
environments and adapt to dry climates. "More diverse crop pangenomes will
help us understand how the counteracting forces of past domestication
bottlenecks and newly arisen structural variants influence future crop
improvement in changing climates", says Prof. Dr. Nils Stein, head of IPK's
Genebank department.



[www.ipk-gatersleben.de]
024_PM_14_Pangenome_engl_final.pdf