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

大麦是英国农业中第二重要的作物，支撑着啤酒和威士忌产业，对英国经济的价值约为200亿英镑，以及作为动物饲料的肉类和乳制品产业。在过去的50年里，大麦谷物产量增加了一倍多，主要是由于作物育种的努力，但在气候变化及其相关的新病虫害、化肥和农药价格上涨以及监管机构对降低化学处理水平的要求不断增加的挑战背景下，产量需要保持这一速度，以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，但是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“基因狭窄”的大麦品种中的可用基因。野生大麦提供了一个逃离这个陷阱的机会，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隐藏在大量无用的DNA中，并被紧紧地包裹在细胞核内，以至于它们几乎无法产生比父辈更好的新组合。在这个项目中，我们建议研究这些“被困的基因”。令人惊讶的是，谷物比人类含有更多的DNA，因此在基因水平上更难研究，但最近在DNA测序和指纹识别方面的技术进步使它们成为可能。这一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，这些组合目前是现代大麦育种家无法获得的，从而保持未来所需的作物改良。

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.