1000HRG Program
Overview
1000 Historical Rice Genomes Program is collaborative effort to sequence a thousand genomes of cultivated rice and its wild relatives from genus Oryza collected in the last 200 years. We involved curators and managers of multiple herbarium collections who do an amazing job identifying suitable specimens and decipher their meta-data. Multiple plant genomics laboratories are involved in this program with several research projects outlined below.
Collaboration
Plant genomics:
Rafal Gutaker, Royal Botanic Gardens, Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew
Jose de Vega and Anthony Hall, Earlham Institute
Michael Purugganan, New York University
Rod Wing, University of Arizona and KAUST
Collection managers and curators:
Norbert Holstein, Natural History Museum, London, UK
Dominique Juhe-Beaulaton, National Musuem of Natural History, Paris, France
Michaela Schmull, Harvard University Herbarium, Cambridge, USA
Flora Pennec, National Museum of Natural History, Paris, France
Research Projects
Project 1:
The ‘Green’ revolution doubled crop production in Asia through the introduction of irrigation, agro- chemicals and high-yielding variety monocultures, at the cost of reduced genetic diversity (population bottleneck) and radical changes of cultivation habitat. It is unclear how population bottlenecks and habitat turnover affect plant-environment and plant-microbiome interactions. To fill that gap, I would like to investigate the changes in rice genetic diversity and how it affected environmental and microbial interactions throughout agricultural revolutions using herbarium specimens.
Project 2 (with Purugganan lab):
Traditional rice varieties provide a living laboratory system for crop adaptation to diverse ecosystems, partly in response to past climate change. We will use the evolution of rice in China and Southeast Asia as our starting point, and propose an approach that integrates whole population genomics data, stress response data, geographical location and climactic history to understand the impact of fluctuating climate on rice niche, diversity and adaptation. To undertake this project, we will increase our historical sampling of rice landraces from the East and Southeast Asia.
Project 3 (with Wing lab):
To better understand the potential of natural variation for rice improvement, we should look beyond the domesticated species. Of particular interest are wild species occupying vast environmental and climatic zones in Central and South America. We would like to explore the natural variation, population structure and environmental adaptations in the CCDD genome wild rice species: O. latifolia, O. alta and O. gradiglumis. O. latifolia can be found between 30°S and 20°N latitudes, across many climatic zones, while the distribution of other species is very narrow.