A Genome Resource for Green Millet Setaria Viridis Enables Discovery of Agronomically Valuable Loci

Overview

Journal Nat Biotechnol

Specialty Biotechnology

Date 2020 Oct 6

PMID 33020633

Citations 66

Authors

Sujan Mamidi

Adam Healey

Pu Huang

Jane Grimwood

Jerry Jenkins

Kerrie Barry

Avinash Sreedasyam

Shengqiang Shu

John T Lovell

Maximilian Feldman

Jinxia Wu

Yunqing Yu

Cindy Chen

Jenifer Johnson

Hitoshi Sakakibara

Takatoshi Kiba

Tetsuya Sakurai

Rachel Tavares

Dmitri A Nusinow

Ivan Baxter

Jeremy Schmutz

Thomas P Brutnell

Elizabeth A Kellogg

Affiliations

Soon will be listed here.

Abstract

Wild and weedy relatives of domesticated crops harbor genetic variants that can advance agricultural biotechnology. Here we provide a genome resource for the wild plant green millet (Setaria viridis), a model species for studies of C grasses, and use the resource to probe domestication genes in the close crop relative foxtail millet (Setaria italica). We produced a platinum-quality genome assembly of S. viridis and de novo assemblies for 598 wild accessions and exploited these assemblies to identify loci underlying three traits: response to climate, a 'loss of shattering' trait that permits mechanical harvest and leaf angle, a predictor of yield in many grass crops. With CRISPR-Cas9 genome editing, we validated Less Shattering1 (SvLes1) as a gene whose product controls seed shattering. In S. italica, this gene was rendered nonfunctional by a retrotransposon insertion in the domesticated loss-of-shattering allele SiLes1-TE (transposable element). This resource will enhance the utility of S. viridis for dissection of complex traits and biotechnological improvement of panicoid crops.

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