四倍体野生稻快速驯化: 启动人类新农业文明

通过人工选择优良遗传变异，将野生植物驯化为栽培作物，以满足人类对食物的需求，是人类发展历史中的重要事件，推动了人类文明的持续发展。随着世界人口持续增加，耕地面积不断减少，灾害性天气频发，全球粮食安全问题日趋严峻。基于作物驯化的分子机理及重要农艺性状的遗传基础，结合高通量基因组测序和高效基因组编辑技术，从头驯化野生植物，...

Rapid Domestication of Wild Allotetraploid Rice: Starting a New Era of Human Agricultural Civilization

It is an important event in the human history to domesticate wild plants into cultivated crops through selection of favorable genetic variations. Domesticated crops provide food to meet human needs and thereby promote the sustainable development of human civilization. At present, the global food security is becoming a serious challenge owing to the booming human population, the decrease of arable land, and the frequent occurrence of extreme weather. Based on the understanding of molecular mechanism underlying the domestication and important agronomic traits in crops, de novo domesticating wild plants into new crops, an approach combined with high-throughput genome sequencing and genome editing technology, will be one of effective strategies to face this challenge. Recently a team led by Prof. Jiayang Li in Institute of Genetics and Developmental Biology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, successfully de novo domesticated wild allotetraploid rice by optimizing the genetic transformation system, de novoassembling the wild allotetraploid rice (Oryza alta) genome, and editing several genes that control key domestication-related and agronomical traits, including seed shattering, awn, plant architecture, seed size, and heading date. This is a breakthrough study that not only demonstrated the possibility of rapid de novo domestication of wild allotetraploid rice into a staple cereal to strength global food security, but also provided new insights into the utilization of new ideocrops originating from de novo domestication of wild or semi-wild plants in the future.