Fields of Breeders' Dreams: A Team Effort toward Targeted Crop Improvements -- Community Effort Yields Reference Switchgrass Genome, Environmental Adaptations Data

(Department of Energy/Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory/EurekAlert) ... Identifying and breeding varieties that have high productivity across a range of environments is becoming increasingly important for food, fuel and other applications, and breeders aren't interested in waiting decades to develop new crops.

One example is an ongoing collaborative effort to improve the emerging bioenergy crop switchgrass (Panicum virgatum), which has established 10 experimental gardens located in eight states spread across 1,100 miles. Switchgrass is a perennial grass that quickly grows in a variety of soils and water conditions, standing taller than basketball star LeBron James. In each garden, switchgrass plants clonally propagated from cuttings represent a diverse collection sourced from half of the United States.

As reported January 27, 2021 in Nature, the team led by researchers at the University of Texas (UT) at Austin, the HudsonAlpha Institute for Biotechnology (HudsonAlpha), and the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) Joint Genome Institute (JGI), a DOE Office of Science User Facility located at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab), has produced a high-quality reference sequence of the complex switchgrass genome using samples collected at these gardens. Building off this work, researchers at all four DOE Bioenergy Research Centers (BRCs)--the Great Lakes Bioenergy Research Center (GLBRC), the Center for Bioenergy Innovation, the Center for Advanced Bioenergy & Bioproducts Institute, and the Joint BioEnergy Institute--have expanded the network of common gardens and are exploring improvements to switchgrass through more targeted genome editing techniques to customize the crop for additional end products.

The genetic diversity within this set of plants, each with a fully-sequenced genome, and these gardens allow researchers to test what genes affect the plant's adaptability to various environmental conditions. "To accelerate breeding for bioenergy, we need to make connections between the plant's traits and genetic diversity," said John Lovell, an evolutionary biologist at HudsonAlpha and first author of the study. "For that, it's necessary to have the plant's genome as a reference. Additionally, having the gardens as a resource helps breeders find genetic regions of interest." The combination of field data and genetic information has allowed the research team to associate climate adaptations with switchgrass biology, information that could be useful toward the DOE's interest in harnessing the crop as a versatile candidate biomass feedstock for producing sustainable alternative fuels. READ MORE

Lovell J et al. Genomic mechanisms of climate adaptation in polyploid bioenergy switchgrass. Nature. 2021 Jan 27. doi: 10.1038/s41586-020-03127-1