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

大麦着丝粒周围异染色质基因组分的多样性和进化。

• 批准号: BB/I022198/1
• 负责人: Joanne Russell
• 金额: $ 18.12万
• 依托单位: James Hutton Institute
• 依托单位国家: 英国
• 项目类别: Research Grant
• 财政年份: 2012
• 资助国家: 英国
• 起止时间: 2012 至 无数据
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://gtr.ukri.org/projects?ref=BB%2FI022198%2F1
• 关键词: diversity; evolution; gene; component; barley

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.

大麦是英国农业中第二重要的作物，支撑着啤酒和威士忌行业（为英国经济带来约 200 亿英镑的价值），以及作为动物饲料的肉类和乳制品行业。过去 50 年来，大麦谷物产量增加了一倍多，这主要归功于作物育种工作，但在气候变化及其相关新病虫害、化肥和农药价格上涨以及监管机构对较低水平化学处理的要求不断增加的严峻背景下，产量需要继续以这种速度增长，才能养活不断增长的人口。必须培育新的谷类作物品种来应对这些挑战，但近年来，谷类作物的改良速度已经放缓，因为传统育种已经优化了“遗传狭窄”大麦品种中的可用基因。野生大麦提供了摆脱这个陷阱的方法，因为它含有许多有益的基因变异，如果通过育种转移，可以改善栽培大麦。这比听起来要困难得多，因为所有谷物的大部分基因都埋藏在大量无用的 DNA 中，并且紧紧地包裹在细胞核内，以至于它们几乎无法创造出比其亲本具有更好特性的新组合。在这个项目中，我们建议研究这些“被捕获的基因”。令人惊讶的是，谷物中的 DNA 比人类多得多，因此在基因水平上研究也相应更加困难，但 DNA 测序和指纹识别方面的最新技术进步使它们变得容易获得。这些新知识将为我们提供工具，使我们能够在野生大麦品种中寻找新的、潜在有用的基因组合，而现代大麦育种者目前无法获得这些组合，从而保持未来所需的作物改良。