The sunflower genome provides insights into oil metabolism, flowering and Asterid evolution

By Hélène Badouin, J. Gouzy, Christopher J. Grassa, Florent Murat, S. Staton, Ludovic Cottret, Christine Lelandais-Brière, Gregory L. Owens, S. Carrère, Baptiste Mayjonade and 50 more. Nature, 2017

659 citations recorded by the source corpus.

The domesticated sunflower, Helianthus annuus L., is a global oil crop that has promise for climate change adaptation, because it can maintain stable yields across a wide variety of environmental conditions, including drought. Even greater resilience is achievable through the mining of resistance alleles from compatible wild sunflower relatives, including numerous extremophile species. Here we report a high-quality reference for the sunflower genome (3.6 gigabases), together with extensive transcriptomic data from vegetative and floral organs. The genome mostly consists of highly similar, related sequences and required single-molecule real-time sequencing technologies for successful assembly. Genome analyses enabled the reconstruction of the evolutionary history of the Asterids, further establishing the existence of a whole-genome triplication at the base of the Asterids II clade and a sunflower-specific whole-genome duplication around 29 million years ago. An integrative approach combining quantitative genetics, expression and diversity data permitted development of comprehensive gene networks for two major breeding traits, flowering time and oil metabolism, and revealed new candidate genes in these networks. We found that the genomic architecture of flowering time has been shaped by the most recent whole-genome duplication, which suggests that ancient paralogues can remain in the same regulatory networks for dozens of millions of years. This genome represents a cornerstone for future research programs aiming to exploit genetic diversity to improve biotic and abiotic stress resistance and oil production, while also considering agricultural constraints and human nutritional needs.

Subfields: Genetics, Molecular Biology, Plant Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/68fd9be796a8b11855a9c784b7027da1d4c1f94a

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In Molecular Biology

1. S. Schmidt
2. M. Roach
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1. S. Schmidt
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Citations in the corpus

• Benchmarking transposable element annotation methods for creation of a streamlined, comprehensive pipeline (2019, neutral): “the sunflower (Helianthus annuus) genome [68].”
• Improving Flooding Tolerance of Crop Plants (2018, background): “Glycine max yes yes (Table 4) [51] available Brassica napus yes yes [52] available Helianthus annuus unknown no [53] not available Beta vulgaris unknown no [54] not available Solanum tuberosum unknown no [55] not available”
• Purge Haplotigs: allelic contig reassignment for third-gen diploid genome assemblies (2018, methodology): “Recent advances in third-generation single-molecule sequencing have enabled de novo genome assemblies that have extremely high levels of contiguity and completeness [1 – 3].”