Century-Old Experiment and New Research Identify Genes that Help Barley's Adaptability

For at least 12,000 years, barley has been one of the world's most important cereal crops. Its spread across the globe created random changes to its DNA to survive each new location. It is critical to identify the genes that changed to predict which varieties will thrive in places now struggling with increasingly hotter temperatures, longer stretches of drought, and more dramatic storms.

A century ago, an experiment at the University of Davis California identified locally adapted varieties from a selection of barley from all over the world. A more recent experiment led by the University of California Riverside geneticist Dan Koenig describes dozens of genes that contribute to barley's adaptability. Some of these genes were found to help barley time its reproductive processes to the most optimal parts of the breeding season. “Flowering either too early or too late means the plant won't be able to produce seeds. For crops to produce the maximum amount of seed, they must flower in a very narrow window,” said Koenig.

Koenig and his group used barley varieties from the Barley Composite Cross II experiment. They realized that the seed from their experiment could be used as a time machine to observe the adaptation process and identify genes that help barley's survival. According to Koenig, during their experiment of 58 growing seasons, the field went from 15,000 genetically distinct individual plants to a single plant lineage dominating 60% of the population. “We were shocked by the amount of change that occurred over a short evolutionary time,” Koenig said. “Natural selection completely reshaped genetic diversity across the whole genome in just a human's lifetime.”

For more details, read the article in UCR News.