This article has been reviewed according to Science X's editorial process and policies. Editors have highlighted the following attributes while ensuring the content's credibility: Research teams from INRAE, the University of Clermont Auvergne and the CNRS have reconstructed 10 ancient genomes (paleogenomes) that are the common ancestors of 84 botanical species of agronomic interest. Their work makes it possible to identify particular genes, shared across different species of plants and retained throughout their evolutionary history, that might play a key role in adapting to environmental constraints such as drought.
The comparative study, which focuses on wheat and barley genes, has enabled the identification of around a hundred variants of genes that have been key to helping these crops to adapt to changes in climate across the 10,000-year history of their domestication and selection by humans. The teams have developed two open-access tools for scientists and plant breeders. The results, published in Molecular Plant and Nature Plants, open up new avenues for varietal selection programmes now faced with the challenge of adaptation to a changing climate.
Plants of different species share common genes that could be important in driving adaptation to specific environmental constraints. The teams set out to discover how knowledge of a gene's role in one species could be applied to the study of another species of interest for plant breeding. They analyzed and compared 84 genomes from modern flowering plants that are representative of cultivated plants worldwide.
This allowed them to reconstruct 10 ancestral paleogenomes more than 200 million years old that can be described as the 'founder' genes for modern species. These paleogenomes make it possible to identify genes that have conserved a shared genomic ancestral context and the same biological function, meaning that they could still contribute to traits or processes across different species. Such genes potentially drive the development of traits of interest for modern agricultural challenges, such as drought tolerance or flowering dates.
Beyond the identification of genes of major agronomic interest, the reconstruction of paleogenomes also provides key knowledge about the evolutionary history of plants. In particular, it has enabled the team to establish the timing of the emergence of major botanical families and retrace key evolutionary trajectories, including those leading to divergence between aquatic and terrestrial plants, herbaceous and woody species, C3 and C4 species, and modulator and non-modulator species. Wheat and barley were selected as the focus of the study because both are grain crops of major agronomic interest.
They are among the earliest crops to have been domesticated more than 10,000 years ago in the Fertile Crescent. These two cereals supported the emergence of agriculture, displaying considerable parallels in both their historical timelines and the environmental conditions under which humans have cultivated them. This makes them highly relevant to the analysis and comparison of key retained genes.
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