{"id":292623,"date":"2025-07-26T06:41:15","date_gmt":"2025-07-26T06:41:15","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/292623\/"},"modified":"2025-07-26T06:41:15","modified_gmt":"2025-07-26T06:41:15","slug":"ipk-researchers-tap-genetic-power-of-barleys-wild-cousin","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/292623\/","title":{"rendered":"IPK Researchers Tap Genetic Power of Barley\u2019s Wild Cousin"},"content":{"rendered":"

Wild relatives of cultivated crops offer crucial genetic diversity, providing a reservoir of traits that can help improve yield, resilience, and stress tolerance. While their value has long been recognized, technological limitations have made it difficult to fully explore their potential \u2014 until now. Recent advances in high-throughput genomic tools have made it possible to study both crops and their wild counterparts with unprecedented detail.<\/p>\n

In a major step forward, an international research team led by the IPK Leibniz Institute investigated the structural genome evolution of domesticated barley (Hordeum vulgare) and its closest wild relative,\u00a0Hordeum bulbosum. For the study, Dr. Frank Blattner gathered\u00a0H. bulbosum\u00a0genotypes from natural populations across the Mediterranean. Combined with genebank accessions, the team compiled a diverse panel of 263 genotypes, including both diploid and tetraploid forms.<\/p>\n

After analysing population structure, the team successfully assembled and annotated 10 reference-quality, chromosome-scale genomes of this important wild species \u2014 laying the groundwork for future barley breeding innovations, according to a\u00a0press release.<\/a><\/p>\n

\u201cThe tetraploid forms have two origins, one in Greece and one in southwestern Asia. In Asia they originated already between one and two million years ago, while in Greece tetraploids arose only within the last 100,000 years,\u201d explains Jia-Wu Feng, first author of the study. \u201cWe found evidence that both types are now interbreeding, which provides a way for polyploids to enrich their genomic diversity through multiple origins,\u201d Blattner adds.<\/p>\n

Although Hordeum bulbosum is barley\u2019s closest wild relative \u2014 having diverged an estimated 4.5 million years ago \u2014 it has followed a distinct evolutionary path. One of the most striking differences lies in genome size. \u201cSurprisingly, we found that the expansion of the barley genome didn\u2019t happen evenly, but mainly at the chromosome ends,\u201d says Jia-Wu Feng.<\/p>\n

To harness traits from wild species like\u00a0H. bulbosum, researchers often use introgression lines \u2014 plants created by crossing crops with wild relatives to introduce specific genetic segments into the cultivated genome. Using their newly developed reference genomes, the team successfully decoded the structure of the Ryd4 resistance locus, nearly 40 years after it was first introgressed from\u00a0H. bulbosum\u00a0into barley.<\/p>\n

\u201cThis is without question the most promising crop-wild introgression in barley to date, and the only one close to being deployed in commercial varieties. It provides qualitative resistance to the devastating barley yellow dwarf virus, which affects several cereal crops,\u201d explains Dr. Martin Mascher, head of IPK\u2019s Domestication Genomics research group and a member of the German Centre for Integrative Biodiversity Research (iDiv) Halle-Jena-Leipzig.<\/p>\n

\u201cHaving genome sequences for crop wild relatives will be useful for more targeted introgression breeding in the future,\u201d says Mascher.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cThe systematic genomic characterisation of crop plants and their wild relatives is important foundational research to make plant genetic resources better accessible for crop improvement,\u201d says Prof. Dr. Nils Stein, head of the Federal Ex situ Genebank for agricultural and horticultural crops at IPK Leibniz Institute, \u201cand it is the driver to evolve the genebank from a seedstore into a biodigital resources centre.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Wild relatives of cultivated crops offer crucial genetic diversity, providing a reservoir of traits that can help improve…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":292624,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3846],"tags":[69288,267,2343,70,29921,16,15],"class_list":{"0":"post-292623","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-genetics","8":"tag-featured-europe","9":"tag-genetics","10":"tag-research","11":"tag-science","12":"tag-seed-world-europe","13":"tag-uk","14":"tag-united-kingdom"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@uk\/114918174604926343","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/292623","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=292623"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/292623\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/292624"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=292623"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=292623"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=292623"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}