(Nature Cover Study)
Scientific research builds the cornerstone of food security, and abundant cultivation resources are the guarantee of global climate change and food security.
The food we enjoy every day comes from the efforts of generations of cultivators and breeders.
Hexaploidally cultivated oats (Avena sativa L.) have six sets of chromosomes with a complex evolutionary history. In this week's top academic journal Nature, Nick Sirijovski and his colleagues demonstrated a high-quality Sativa reference genome, as well as a reference genome of its close relatives diploid diploid oats and tetraploid island leaf oats.
By examining these three genomes, the researchers were able to track genomic recombination during crop evolution. They were also able to map genes for important agronomic traits, highlighting gene families associated with human health and nutrition.
With health and sustainability important on the global agenda, the team hopes this new resource will support genomics-assisted breeding and trait research to address these and more challenges.
Continent:
Oats are important cereal crops and, as the main polyploid crop, have significant advantages in terms of biomass, viability and adaptability to environmental change, and play a unique role in addressing food security challenges. At present, many crop genomes with important commercial value have been sequenced and assembled, providing an important reference for the genetic improvement of their important traits and the selection of high-yield and high-quality varieties. However, oat genome sequencing has progressed slowly, mainly because the genome sequencing assembly of commonly cultivated oats as a hexaploid genome is large, the repeat sequence content is high, and the two subgenes have a high homology relationship between them. As the origin and main planting center of hexaploid cultivation of naked oats, it is of great strategic significance for China to construct its reference genome for in-depth research on the unique naked oat germplasm resources of mainland China.
On June 30, 2021, the oat research team led by Ren Changzhong, chief scientist of the National Oat Buckwheat Industry Technology System of the Baicheng Academy of Agricultural Sciences, together with Sichuan Agricultural University and the Chinese Academy of Sciences Genetics, selected the latest three-generation ultra-long reading long sequencing technology and assisted by Hi-C chromosome conformation capture technology to sequence the whole genome of the traditional local varieties of naked oats originating in Wuzhai, Shanxi, the origin center of naked oats in mainland China, and released the high-quality reference genome sequence of hexarithal cultivation of naked oats for the first time. This not only fills the gap in the lack of high-quality reference genomes for hexaploid cultivated naked oats, but also provides an important reference for genome assembly and evolutionary studies of polyploid species.