Genetic Resources

European genetic resources conservation in a rapidly changing world: three existential challenges for the crop, forest and animal domains in the 21st century

2024-03-11T08:49:56+00:00

Even though genetic resources represent a fundamental reservoir of options to achieve sustainable development goals in a changing world, they are overlooked in the policy agenda and severely threatened. The conservation of genetic resources relies on complementary in situ and ex situ approaches appropriately designed for each type of organism. Environmental and socioeconomic changes raise new challenges and opportunities for sustainable use and conservation of genetic resources.

Aiming at a more integrated and adaptive approach, European scientists and genetic resources managers with long experience in the agricultural crop, animal and forestry domains joined their expertise to address three critical challenges: (1) how to adapt genetic resources conservation strategies to climate change, (2) how to promote in situ conservation strategies and (3) how can genetic resources conservation contribute to and benefit from agroecological systems. We present here 31 evidence-based statements and 88 key recommendations elaborated around these questions for policymakers, conservation actors and the scientific community.

We anticipate that stakeholders in other genetic resources domains and biodiversity conservation actors across the globe will have interest in these crosscutting and multi-actor recommendations, which support several biodiversity conservation policies and practices.

Leaf trichome diversity, acylsugar concentration, and their relationships to leaf area in Solanum galapagense

2024-01-16T09:40:15+00:00

Glandular trichomes are physical and chemical barriers used by some tomato wild relatives to confer resistance against insect pests and diseases transmitted by them. Solanum galapagense has been identified as one of the potential sources of insect pest resistance. The present study aimed to examine the trichome diversity and acylsugar concentration of 26 accessions of S. galapagense along with one cultivated tomato (S. lycopersicum) and one cherry tomato (S. l. cerasiforme) cultivar. The results revealed large phenotypic variation among S. galapagense accessions for all studied traits. The S. galapagense accessions had significantly higher trichome types IV density on the adaxial and abaxial surfaces of the leaf and greater acylsugar concentration but a smaller leaflet area than the cultivated tomato. The selected cherry tomato line represents greater trichome type IV density and acylsugar concentration than other groups. The acylsugar concentration was positively associated with trichome type IV but negatively associated with trichome type V on both leaf surfaces. DNA markers revealed the presence of two previously identified whitefly-resistance alleles in S. galapagense accessions. This study will support breeding programmes aiming to improve insect pest resistance in tomato cultivars using crop wild relatives.

A public mid-density genotyping platform for cultivated blueberry (Vaccinium spp.)

2024-04-11T07:55:50+00:00

Small public breeding programmes have many barriers to adopting technology, particularly creating and using genetic marker panels for genomic-based decisions in selection. Here we report the creation of a DArTag panel of 3,000 loci distributed across the tetraploid genome of blueberry (Vaccinium corymbosum) for use in molecular breeding and genomic prediction. The creation of this marker panel brings cost-effective and rapid genotyping capabilities to public and private breeding programmes. The open access provided by this platform will allow genetic data sets generated on the marker panel to be compared and joined across projects, institutions and countries. This genotyping resource has the power to make routine genotyping a reality for any breeder of blueberry.

The first draft genome sequence of Russian olive (Elaeagnus angustifolia L.) in Iran

2024-04-03T14:02:00+00:00

Russian olive (Elaeagnus angustifolia L.) is a native tree species of Iran and the Caucasus region growing in both wild habitats and cultivated settings. The area under cultivation of this tree has been increasing in recent years due to its ability to withstand drought and soil salinity. Revealing the complete genome of this tree holds great importance. To achieve this, a local cultivar of Russian olive was sampled from the northwest region of Iran for whole genome sequencing using the Illumina platform resulting in approximately 6GB of raw data. A quality check of the raw data indicated that approximately 45,011,388 read pairs were obtained from sequences totalling around 6.7×109bp with CG content of 31%. To assemble the genome of the Russian olive tree, the raw data was aligned to a reference sequence of the jujube (Ziziphus jujuba) genome, which is the taxonomically closest plant to the Russian olive. Assembly of alignments yielded a genome size of 553,696,299bp consisting of 339,701 contigs. The N50 value was 5,300 with an L50 value of 24,921 and GC content of the Russian olive genome was 31.5%. This research represents the first report on the genome of the Iranian cultivar of the Russian olive tree.