Hordeum vulgare Exome

Barley is one of the first crops domesticated around 10,000 years ago in the area of the Fertile Crescent. Wild barley populations have a scattered distribution from North Africa across the Near East to Central Asia and are apparently adapted to a wide range of environments. However, the current and historical area of barley cultivation greatly exceeds the natural wild barley distribution, reaching extreme northern latitudes in Scandinavia with very different photoperiod, precipitation and temperature regimes. Since the wild barley did not follow barley cultivation into these new environments as a weed, it is assumed that cultivated barley evolved new adaptations that were selected by early farmers and progressively allowed the north-western spread of agriculture. However, the identity and the genetic basis of these adaptations are still largely unknown. To facilitate the discovery of the adaptive genetic variants, we expand the existing collection of wild and domesticated barley exomes. Although the entire known barley exome is captured in these datasets, we are currently focusing on genes involved in biotic and abiotic stress response.