Agriculture

The use of genetic information is now indispensable for modern plant breeding. Even though DNA sequencing has become much cheaper since the human genome was decoded for the very first time in 2003, collecting the full genetic information still accounts for a large part of the costs in animal and plant breeding. One trick to reduce these costs is to sequence only a very small and randomly selected part of the genome and to complete the remaining gaps using mathematical and statistical techniques.

Crops often have multiple genomes hybridised from their parents, a condition known as polyploidy. Previously plant breeding has used predictions based only on DNA sequence, but this research suggests that applying knowledge about RNA could help provide more accurate predictions of how traits are passed on.

Agriculture is the major player in contributing to global food security. Increasing our crop productivity is currently a challenging task due to the limitations of climatic change and decreasing of agricultural land. Sustainable agriculture has been considered an excellent solution for the prevailing and future environmental conditions. To contribute to sustainable agriculture by improving crop productivity, we need precise information about these crops. Knowledge about the interactions of different yield components is of great importance for the best possible exploitation of yield potential. In barley, it is particularly important to increase the number of grains per spike. However, which factors play a role in this and what differences there are between different barley row-types has hardly been researched so far.