A draft sequence of the barley genome

摘要：大麦是英国农业中第二重要的作物。优质麦芽大麦(约占总量的30%)支撑着英国的啤酒和威士忌行业，为英国经济带来了约20B英镑的收入，其中近5B英镑直接上缴国库。较低质量的大麦颗粒和制麦过程的副产品是支撑肉类和乳制品行业的动物饲料的主要成分，大麦秸秆是反刍动物的营养来源，用于冬季动物垫料和园艺中的霜冻保护。2010年3月，商人对大麦秸秆的收购价格达到每吨出厂86 GB，相当于谷物的价格。在社会方面，大麦种植及其在威士忌行业的使用间接养活了苏格兰多达40,000个家庭，主要是在农村社区。在过去的50年里，包括大麦在内的谷物产量增加了一倍多，这主要归功于少数商业组织的努力，这些组织寻求改善我们主要农作物的质量、多样性和表现。国家农业植物学研究所最近的分析表明，在过去的25年里，这种改善的90%以上可以归因于通过植物育种创新的遗传学(与农业实践相反)。尽管取得了相当大的成功，作物产量到2050年需要再翻一番，才能养活大约90亿人口，气候变化带来了反复无常和可能具有破坏性的天气模式，以及推动低投入可持续生产，但该行业正面临前所未有的挑战。科学界一致认为，要满足这些要求，需要更深入地了解如何将大麦约35,000个基因的不同变种(称为等位基因)以最佳组合形式结合在一起，以提高产量、质量和韧性，以及允许植物育种者在作物改良计划中提高遗传获得率的方法。在这个项目中，我们建议生成大麦基因组(其遗传蓝图)中完整的基因补充信息，并开始探索在过去25年成功的产量改良中，育种者是如何组装不同版本和组合的基因的。我们的假设是，从遗传学角度理解过去作物生产的成功是如何带来的，将使我们能够预测如何在未来取得更快更远的成功，从而使我们有能力应对上面列出的关键全球挑战。

Summary: Barley is the second most important crop in UK agriculture. High quality malting barley (some 30% of the total) underpins the beer and whisky sector in the UK that is worth some £20B to the UK economy with almost £5B flowing directly to the treasury as duty. Lower quality barley grain and by-products of the malting process are a major component of animal feed that underpins the meat and dairy industries and barley straw is a source of nutrition for ruminants, is used for animal bedding in the winter and for frost protection in horticulture. In March 2010 merchants' buying prices for barley straw reached £86 per ton ex-farm, equivalent to the price of the grain. In social terms, barley cultivation and its use in the whisky industry indirectly supports up to 40,000 families in Scotland, largely in rural communities. Over the past 50 years cereal grain yields, including barley, have more than doubled, due largely to the efforts of a small number of commercial organisations that seek to improve the quality, diversity and performance of our key agricultural crops. Recent analyses by the National Institute of Agricultural Botany have shown that over the past 25 years, greater than 90% of this improvement can be attributed to genetics through innovation in plant breeding (as opposed to agricultural practices). Despite this considerable success, with crop yields needing to double again by 2050 in order to feed an estimated 9B population, climate change bringing erratic and potentially devastating weather patterns and the drive for low input sustainable production, the industry is facing challenges unlike any that have gone before. The scientific community agree that to meet these will require a deeper understanding of how different variants (called alleles) of barley's estimated 35,000 genes can be brought together in optimal combinations to increase yield, quality and resilience, and methods that allow plant breeders to improve the rate of genetic gain in crop improvement programs. In this project we propose to generate information on the complete complement of genes in the barley genome (its genetic blueprint) and to start to explore how different versions and combinations of genes have been assembled by breeders over the past 25 years of successful yield improvement. Our hypothesis is that an understanding in genetic terms of how crop production successes of the past were brought about will allow us to predict how to bring about further and faster successes in the future, equipping us to address the key global challenges listed above.