On August 9, 2021, Ma Zhiying’s team, which belongs to the State Key Laboratory of Crop Improvement and Regulation in North China, HEBAU, published their long research article High-Quality Genome Assembly and Resequencing of Modern Cotton Cultivars Provide Resources for Crop Improvement online on Nature Genetics, the top international journal of genetics. This study took the lead in assembling the genomes of modern varieties of upland cotton and island cotton, deciphered the variation and law of marine and land interspecific genomes and intraspecific genomes on land, revealed the genetic effect of large-scale germplasm variation of upland cotton, and provided new theoretical basis and resources for the improvement of important crop traits.
Upland cotton and island cotton account for more than 90% and about 10% of the total global cotton production, respectively, and they are both high-quality fiber providers. While gaining multi-stress resistance, the breeders have been trying to cultivate new varieties of upland cotton by improving yield and quality, and transferred the excellent characters of island cotton to upland cotton to further improve quality and resistance. However, there is still lack of in-depth understanding of the genomic information of modern cotton varieties and the interspecific genomic variation of upland cotton in the process of modern breeding. The structural variation revealed the resequence based on more genomes assembly and variety resources is very important for cotton molecular improvement, but the mechanism and genetic effect of cotton structural variation are still under revealed.
1. The high-quality genomes of modern land and marine varieties were assembled for the first time, and thousands of new genes of cotton were discovered.
2. The structural variation map of island cotton and upland cotton was decoded, and a number of new variations affecting gene expression were found.
3. The genetic effects of structural variation in upland cotton were explored, and a new gene GhNCS resistant to Verticillium wilt was found.
The research was funded by the National Key R & D Plan (2016YFD01011405 and 2016YFD00101006), the National Cotton Industry Technology System (CARS15-03), Hebei Science and Technology Support Plan (16226307D) and Hebei High-End Talent Plan (031601801).
