A draft sequence of the barley genome

大麦是英国农业中第二重要的作物。高品质的麦芽（约占总量的30%）支撑着英国的啤酒和威士忌行业，该行业对英国经济的价值约为200亿英镑，其中近50亿英镑作为关税直接流入国库。质量较低的大麦谷物和麦芽加工过程的副产品是动物饲料的主要组成部分，是肉类和乳制品行业的基础，大麦秸秆是反刍动物的营养来源，在冬季用于动物垫料和园艺防冻。2010年3月，商人购买大麦秸秆的价格达到每吨86英镑，相当于谷物的价格。在社会方面，大麦种植及其在威士忌工业中的应用间接支持了苏格兰多达4万个家庭，其中大部分在农村社区。在过去的50年里，包括大麦在内的谷物产量增加了一倍多，这在很大程度上要归功于少数商业组织的努力，他们寻求改善我们主要农作物的质量、多样性和性能。国家农业植物学研究所（National Institute of Agricultural Botany）最近的分析表明，在过去25年里，超过90%的这种改善可归因于通过植物育种创新（而不是农业实践）实现的遗传。尽管取得了相当大的成功，但到2050年，作物产量需要再翻一番才能养活大约90亿人口，气候变化带来了不稳定的、可能具有破坏性的天气模式，以及低投入可持续生产的驱动，该行业正面临着前所未有的挑战。科学界一致认为，要实现这些目标，需要更深入地了解大麦约3.5万个基因的不同变体（称为等位基因）如何以最佳组合方式组合在一起，以提高产量、质量和恢复力，以及让植物育种家在作物改良计划中提高遗传增益率的方法。在这个项目中，我们建议生成关于大麦基因组（其遗传蓝图）中基因的完整补体的信息，并开始探索在过去25年成功提高产量的过程中，育种者如何组装不同版本的基因和基因组合。我们的假设是，从遗传角度理解过去作物生产的成功是如何实现的，将使我们能够预测如何在未来取得进一步和更快的成功，使我们能够应对上述主要的全球挑战。

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.