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行业，对英国经济价值约200亿英镑，以及肉类和乳制品行业作为动物饲料。在过去的50年里，大麦产量翻了一番多，主要是由于作物育种的努力，但产量需要以这种速度保持增长，以养活不断增长的人口，在气候变化及其相关的新害虫和疾病的挑战背景下，化肥和农药价格上涨，监管机构对较低水平的化学处理的要求越来越高。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。野生大麦提供了一个逃离这个陷阱，因为它含有许多有益的基因变异，如果它们通过育种转移，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被埋在大量无用的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它们的父母更好的新组合。在这个项目中，我们建议研究这些“被困基因”。令人惊讶的是，谷物中的DNA比人类多得多，相应地在基因水平上更难研究，但最近DNA测序和指纹技术的进步使它们变得容易获得。这一新知识将提供工具，使我们能够通过野生大麦品种寻找新的，潜在有用的基因组合，这些基因组合目前无法为现代大麦育种者所用，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.