Edaphic adaptation in barley wild relatives and its transfer to the domesticate

Project Information

TRANSFER

Grant agreement ID: 949873

DOI

10.3030/949873

Project closed

EC signature date 29 October 2020

Start date 1 February 2021

End date 31 January 2026

Funded under

• EXCELLENT SCIENCE - European Research Council (ERC)

Total cost

€ 1 499 928,00

EU contribution

€ 1 499 928,00

Coordinated by

LEIBNIZ - INSTITUT FUER PFLANZENGENETIK UND KULTURPFLANZENFORSCHUNG
Germany

Periodic Reporting for period 4 - TRANSFER (Edaphic adaptation in barley wild relatives and its transfer to the domesticate)

Reporting period: 2025-08-01 to 2026-01-31

Summary of the context and overall objectives of the project

Modern agriculture faces the major challenge of producing enough food under increasingly difficult environmental conditions. Climate change, soil degradation, and salinization are reducing the productivity of farmland in many regions of the world. At the same time, crop plants have lost much of their natural genetic diversity through centuries of domestication and intensive breeding. This limits their ability to adapt to new stresses.

Wild relatives of crops often thrive in harsh environments and carry valuable genes that could help make agriculture more resilient. However, these wild species are difficult to use in breeding because they are genetically different from modern crops and poorly characterized at the genomic level. As a result, much of their potential remains untapped.

The TRANSFER project addressed this problem by studying wild relatives of barley that are naturally adapted to saline soils in South America. The aim was to understand how these plants cope with challenging soil conditions at the genetic level and to explore how useful traits could be transferred into cultivated barley. To achieve this, the project developed high-quality genome sequences, compared the genomes of multiple wild species, and combined genomic analyses with physiological and genetic experiments.

During the project, major technological breakthroughs in DNA sequencing made it possible to expand the original scope considerably. Instead of focusing on a small number of species, the project evolved into a comprehensive analysis of genetic diversity across the entire barley genus. This provided a much deeper understanding of how wild barley relatives have evolved, adapted to different environments, and exchanged genes over time.

The project has shown that unlocking the potential of wild plant diversity requires both advanced genomic resources and a realistic understanding of complex genetic architectures. By creating a robust genomic framework for barley and its relatives, TRANSFER has laid the foundation for more efficient use of wild genetic resources in future breeding programs. In the long term, this contributes to the development of more resilient crops and supports sustainable food production under changing environmental conditions.

Work performed from the beginning of the project to the end of the period covered by the report and main results achieved so far

The TRANSFER project investigated how wild relatives of barley have adapted to challenging environments and how their genetic diversity can be better used for crop research and breeding. To address this question, the project combined advanced DNA sequencing technologies with comparative genomics, evolutionary analysis, and experimental work on wild barley species.

During the project, major technological breakthroughs in genome sequencing enabled the generation of high-quality, chromosome-scale genome sequences for a large number of barley wild relatives. Instead of focusing on a small number of species as originally planned, the project expanded to a comprehensive analysis of genetic diversity across the entire barley genus. This resulted in a genus-wide pangenome that captures both shared and species-specific genetic variation and provides a new reference framework for barley research.

Comparative analyses of these genomes revealed extensive structural variation and complex evolutionary histories involving hybridization and gene flow between species. These findings changed the understanding of how genetic diversity is structured in wild barley relatives and highlighted the importance of genome-scale approaches for studying adaptation and evolution.

In parallel, the project established experimental resources and protocols for physiological and genetic studies in wild barley species. Although classical genetic mapping across species proved to be constrained by biological barriers, these experiments provided important insights into reproductive biology and helped refine realistic strategies for future trait analysis.

All major datasets, genome resources, and analytical workflows generated by TRANSFER have been made openly available to the scientific community. Results have been disseminated through publications in leading international journals, invited conference presentations, and review and perspective articles that place the findings in a broader scientific and societal context. Together, these outcomes provide a lasting foundation for future research on crop wild relatives and support the long-term goal of developing more resilient crops through informed use of genetic diversity.

Progress beyond the state of the art and expected potential impact (including the socio-economic impact and the wider societal implications of the project so far)

At the start of the TRANSFER project, research on crop wild relatives was constrained by limited genomic resources, fragmented genome assemblies, and incomplete representations of genetic diversity. These limitations restricted the analysis of structural variation, gene content, and evolutionary processes, and hampered the systematic use of wild germplasm in crop research and breeding.

The project advanced the state of the art by establishing chromosome-scale genome assemblies for a comprehensive and representative set of barley wild relatives. Enabled by recent breakthroughs in long-read sequencing and chromosome conformation capture technologies, these resources provided unprecedented resolution of genome structure, haplotype diversity, and sequence variation across species. This allowed comparative and evolutionary analyses that were previously not feasible in complex plant genomes.

By extending the original scope from a small number of target species to a genus-wide pangenome framework, TRANSFER created a new reference system for studying genetic diversity in barley and its relatives. The integration of multiple high-quality genome assemblies, whole-genome alignments, and graph-based representations enabled systematic exploration of structural variants, introgressions, and lineage-specific genome remodeling at scale.

Beyond resource generation, the project established standardized analytical pipelines and data structures that facilitate reproducible and comparative genomics across large datasets. These tools and workflows lower technical barriers for future research and support the long-term sustainability of genomic infrastructures in plant science.

By the end of the project, TRANSFER had delivered a comprehensive genomic platform, extensive comparative datasets, and an evolutionary framework for interpreting diversity in wild barley relatives. These outcomes go substantially beyond the previous state of the art and provide a foundation for future work in functional genomics, population genetics, and genomics-assisted breeding, both in barley and in other crop systems.

Photos of plants from different Hordeum species.