Shrub willow Salix purpurea is a potential biofuel feedstock of interest to the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE). Understanding the mechanisms by which they reproduce can help guide breeding efforts. However, scientists are still dissecting its sex-linked traits. For the first time, a shrub willow sex chromosome has been sequenced with sufficient resolution to discover that it shares a structure that’s also found in the mammalian Y chromosome.

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A multi-institutional team including JGI researchers has now sequenced and assembled the genomes of the five major cotton lineages. Senior authors of the paper published April 20, 2020 in Nature Genetics include Jane Grimwood and Jeremy Schmutz of JGI’s Plant Program, both faculty investigators at the HudsonAlpha Institute for Biotechnology. “The goal has been for all this new cotton work, and even the original cotton project was to try to bring in molecular methods of breeding into cotton,” said Schmutz, who heads JGI’s Plant Program. The high quality reference genomes of all five cotton lineages are available for comparative analysis on JGI’s plant data portal Phytozome 

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The perennial grass switchgrass (Panicum virgatum) is a candidate bioenergy feedstock, with deep roots that allow it to access nutrients easily from a variety of soils and a higher tolerance for extreme water conditions. To better understand the genetic basis of local adaptation, researchers established community gardens of switchgrass plants in 10 different field sites on a north-south gradient across the United States. Early results reported in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences from these large-scale field tests conducted over two years reveal fewer tradeoffs in plant fitness and adaptation than expected. Click here to read the full science highlight on the JGI website.

As part of an international team led by researchers at Monash University in Australia, and at Kyoto and Kindai Universities in Japan, scientists at the Joint Genome Institute (JGI) analyzed the genome sequence of the common liverwort (Marchantia polymorpha), a living link in the transition from algae to the multitude of modern land plants. The team identified genes and gene families crucial to plant evolution which have been conserved across plant lineages. The results were reported in the October 5 issue of Cell. Read more on the JGI website..