Pangenome of cultivated beet and crop wild relatives reveals parental relationships of a tetraploid wild beet

Early sugar beet breeding mainly focused on yield, whereas useful traits, like resistances to biotic and abiotic stresses, were neglected. These traits gain more and more relevance in the face of climate change and crop wild relatives have already been identified as an important source for sustainable breeding. Therefore, we sequenced and assembled the genome sequences of four different wild beets, namely B. corolliflora, B. lomatogona, B. macrorhiza and P. procumbens. Together with publicly available genome resources, we harnessed this pangenome dataset A) to resolve the parental relationship of the tetraploid B. corolliflora wild beet using approaches based on k-mers, mapping, and gene sequence alignments and B) to identify regions not present in the cultivated sugar beet with relevance for future breeding endeavours.