Recently, the Vegetable Molecular Design and Breeding Innovation Team and the Cabbage Vegetable Genetic Breeding Innovation Team of the Institute of Vegetables and Flowers of the Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences, together with the Growth and Development Team of the Plant Breeding Department of Wageningen University in the Netherlands, published a paper entitled "Large-Scale Gene Expression Alterations Introduced by Structural Variation" in the internationally renowned journal Nature Genetics Drive morphotype diversification in brassica oleracea", constructing a pan-genome of cabbage that includes all variant types, revealing the hidden driving force of the rapid domestication of cabbage variants, and obtaining a number of key genes for important traits.
Gene expression alterations caused by evolutionary trees and representative materials and structural variations in cabbage.
There are many kinds of cabbage vegetable crops, including cabbage (cabbage), cauliflower, broccoli, kale, amaranth, kale, Brussels sprouts, etc., which are widely planted in the world and are one of the most important vegetable crops in China. The morphological variation of cabbage vegetables is very rich, such as the leaf bulb formed by the multi-layer leaf wrapping of cabbage, the leaflet formed by the axillary bud differentiation of Brussels sprouts, the giant flower bulb formed by the differentiation of the top of the stem of broccoli and cauliflower, and the fleshy bulb formed by the expansion of the base of the stem of the cabbage.
Despite the variety of types, the domestication history is relatively short (less than 2,500 years, some about 500 years). Compared with other crops, cabbage vegetables have the characteristics of rapid diversification and domestication of morphological types. The mechanism by which cabbage vegetables form abnormally rich phenotypic variation in a short domestication process is not well understood. Therefore, revealing the driving force of the rapid domestication of cabbage vegetables and analyzing the genetic mechanism that regulates the differentiation and specific trait formation of different varieties are scientific problems that need to be solved urgently, which are of great significance for the molecular design breeding of cabbage vegetables.
This study provides new insights into the domestication mechanism of cabbage variety, and the regulatory model of "structural variation-gene expression change-phenotypic variation" established in this study has deepened the understanding of the mechanism of structural variation regulating the formation of traits, and is of great significance for answering the major scientific question of "how is plant phenotypic diversification formed". In addition, the research results revealed for the first time that gene expression dose is an important object of domestication selection in addition to gene loss or functional variation, which has reference value for the domestication study of other crops.
Qian Qian, an academician of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, said that this study revealed that structural variation (SV) regulates gene expression as an important "molecular accelerator" for the evolution of cabbage diversity. Structural variation in cabbage populations can change the expression dose of important trait regulatory genes, which in turn drives the formation of a series of morphological diversity of cabbage. This law is universal, and the relevant results not only put forward a new direction for the basic research of crop application, but also provide new ideas for the formulation of germplasm creation and breeding strategies in the future.
Huang Sanwen, an academician of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, said that this study took the lead in revealing a new mode of domestication selection of gene expression dose as an acclimation object, which is an important supplement to the domestication object such as gene loss or functional variation, and the research results can provide a reference for the domestication research of other crops. At the same time, this achievement also once again proves that China is in a leading position in the field of cruciferous genomics.
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