Golden Promise-rapid, a fast-cycling and transformable barley genotype.
Buchmann G, Haraldsson EB, Schüller R, Rütjes T, Walla AA
Crispr
Faster barley research means the drought-tolerant, disease-resistant varieties destined for farmers' fields — and eventually your grocery store shelves — could arrive years sooner.
Scientists work with a special type of barley called Golden Promise because it's easy to edit genetically, but it grows slowly and struggles under stress. They fixed this by swapping in a single small piece of DNA that controls when the plant flowers, creating a version that grows a full generation in just 63 days instead of 84. This faster barley still accepts genetic edits just as well as the original, so researchers can now run experiments much more quickly.
Key Findings
GP-rapid completes a generation in 63 days under speed breeding conditions, 25% faster than the original Golden Promise's 84-day cycle
The new strain carries only a ~0.6 megabase-pair introgression (a tiny DNA swap) at a single chromosomal location, making it nearly genetically identical to the original
GP-rapid retains full Agrobacterium-mediated transformability and CRISPR/Cas9 editing capability, confirmed in parallel transformation experiments
chevron_right Technical Summary
Researchers created a faster-growing version of the standard barley strain used in genetics labs, cutting its breeding cycle by 25% while keeping the traits that make it easy to genetically modify. This new strain, called GP-rapid, will let scientists develop improved barley varieties more quickly.
Abstract Preview
The spring barley cultivar Golden Promise (GP) is the major reference genotype for transformation due to its high transformability and availability of a reference genome. However, GP is characteriz...
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