Nils Stein: The barley pangenome – who cares?

The genomic revolution has made de novo sequencing and assembly a routine task, almost independent of genome complexity. While initial sequencing of the multi-gigabase genome of barley required a large international research consortium, barley genome sequencing and assembly is now a routine task run in in a week as part of a PhD project. This opened new perspectives: crop genome diversity can be captured today at species’ scale. Entire genebank collections representative of global population diversity in barley can be genotyped, providing a proxy for genotype selection in pangenome sequencing and eventually for cataloging diversity at haplotype resolution. Extending this activity further into crop wild relatives is now feasible and maybe critically important in prospect of global challenges introduced by climate change. Examples will be shared about how instructive pangenomes are for research and application.