The diversity and evolution of the gene component of barley peri-centromeric heterochromatin.

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Barley is the second most important crop in UK agriculture, underpinning the beer and whisky industries, worth some £20Bn to the UK economy, and the meat and dairy industries as animal feed. Over the past 50 years barley grain yield has more than doubled, mostly due to crop breeding efforts, but yields need to keep increasing at this rate to feed the ever increasing population, against the challenging background of climate change with its associated new pests and diseases, higher prices for fertiliser and pesticides and increasing demands from regulatory bodies for lower levels of chemical treatments. New varieties of cereal crops must be bred to deal with these challenges but in recent years the improvement rate has slowed in the cereals, as conventional breeding has optimised the available genes in the 'genetically narrow' barley cultivars. Wild barley offers an escape from this trap as it contains many beneficial gene variants that could improve cultivated barley if they were transferred across by breeding. This is much more difficult than it sounds because a large fraction of the genes of all cereals are buried in vast amounts of useless DNA and wrapped up so tightly inside the cell nucleus that they hardly ever make new combinations with better properties than their parents. In this project we propose to study these 'trapped genes'. Surprisingly, cereals have much more DNA in them than humans and are correspondingly more difficult to study at the gene level, but recent technical advances in DNA sequencing and fingerprinting have made them accessible. This new knowledge will provide the tools to allow us to search through wild barley varieties for new, potentially useful gene combinations which are currently inaccessible to modern barley breeders, maintaining the improvement in the crop that is needed for the future.