Allele mining for genes controlling the adaptation of barley to environment Luigi Cattivelli CREA Centro di ricerca genomica e bioinformatica, Fiorenzuola d’Arda
The EU-funded WHEALBI project is taking a multidisciplinary approach to identify, understand and utilise the genetic diversity available in wheat and barley cultivars, landraces and wild relatives. This is strategic to meet the challenge of increasing crop yields while reducing environmental impact. Here we focus on a carefully selected set of 400 barley accessions from extensive ex situ collections which cover the geographical and agroecological adaptive range of barley. Agronomic and life history traits, collected from multienvironment common gardens experiments across Europe, provide a unique dataset to decipher the genetic basis of adaptation to environmental conditions. A comprehensive molecular variant analysis by exome sequencing identified 1.75 million SNPs that have been used to investigate allelic variation at candidate genes driving phenotypic differences for heading date, plant height, etc. We applied these resources to dissect the main loci controlling vernalization and frost tolerance in barley, the analysis has discovered new alleles and copy number variants that shed light on the genomic organization of key genes controlling the adaptation to different environments. This work provides valuable information to identify novel ‘adapted’ alleles for future breeding under a changing climate.
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