LINDELL BEACH, B.C. – The successful sequencing of a wild grass genome is expected to allow scientists to make important advances in food crop production and the development of crops for bioenergy.
Most cool season cereal, forage and turf grasses belong to Pooideae, the largest subfamily of the Poaceae grass family, but the genomes of many pooids are so large and complex that genetic studies become prohibitive.
Brachypodium distachyon, a wild grass native to the Mediterranean and the Middle East, is the first pooid grass to be sequenced.
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It is an endemic weed with little agricultural value, but its simple, compact profile will serve as a model for studies on more complex grasses and commercial crops such as wheat, oats, barley and switchgrass, which is showing promise as a biofuel.
“The Brachypodium genome sequence and its recent emergence as the premium model grass plant will provide detailed information about the function of genes in grasses,” said Todd Mockler, a principal investigator on the project and assistant professor in Oregon State University’s botany and plant pathology department.
“Some plants are a geneticist’s nightmare. Wheat, for instance, is an important crop, but it has an enormous and complex genome five times larger than a human’s. Judging by what we know so far about Brachypodium, its genome likely contains representatives of most grass gene families but in the context of a simpler, more compact and less repetitive diploid genome. Knowing (its) biological functions will give insights into the functions of similar genes in other grasses such as wheat and switchgrass.”
Brachypodium is easy to work with and physically small. Researchers can grow 50,000 plants in a normal sized laboratory. They are easy to genetically manipulate, easy to study and have a short life cycle.
“We are launching Brachypodium with one of the most comprehensive genome annotations of any species, ever,” Mockler said.
“This is a point that took us a decade or more to reach with other plant species.”
Some of the early funding for the study came from the U.S. Department of Energy, which wants to develop plants for cellulosic ethanol.
One plant is switchgrass, which has never been domesticated. The evolution of switchgrass as a crop is now at the stage where corn was 10,000 years ago before generations of selective breeding.
“Some grasses (switchgrass and miscanthus) may make good bioenergy crops because they are fast growing, accumulate a lot of biomass, require minimal inputs, are stress tolerant, and because they are perennial, they don’t need to be planted every season,” Mockler said.
“But these plants haven’t been domesticated or improved yet through breeding. We can’t take 10,000 years to do it. We need to improve them in a matter of a few decades.”
In a recent report in the journal Nature, Mockler said that grass crop improvement for sustainable food and fuel production requires a substantial increase in research.
The Brachypodium sequencing was a global initiative involving 13 countries.
