Integrating Arabidopsis and crop species gene discovery for crop improvement

Abstract

Genome sequence assemblies form a durable and precise framework supporting nearly all areas of biological research, including evolutionary biology, taxonomy and conservation science, pathogen population diversity, crop domestication, and biochemistry. In the early days of plant genomics, resources were limited to a handful of tractable genomes, leading to a tension between focus on discovering mechanisms in experimental species such as Arabidopsis thaliana (Arabidopsis) and on trait analyses in crop species. This tension arose from challenges in translating knowledge of gene function across the large evolutionary distances between Arabidopsis and diverse crop species in the absence of comparative genome support. For some time, these clashing interests influenced funding priorities in plant science that limited both the acquisition of knowledge of mechanisms in Arabidopsis and the timely development of the capacity of crop science to incorporate emerging knowledge of genes and their mechanisms. In this review we show how advances in genomics analysis technologies are revealing a high degree of conservation of molecular mechanisms between evolutionarily distant plant species. This progress is bridging the model-species-to-crop barrier, resulting in ever-increasing unification of plant science that is now accelerating progress in understanding mechanisms underlying diverse traits in crops and improving their performance. We lay out some examples of important priorities and outcomes arising from these new opportunities.