After nearly 4 years of research, 63 scientists from 13 countries have decoded the rye genome. The international group includes researchers from the Department of Genetics, Breeding and Plant Biotechnology of the West Pomeranian University of Technology in Szczecin – Dr Beata Myśków and Dr Stefan Stojałowski.
– The rye genome has almost 8 billion nucleotides, which is more than twice as much as human DNA. The interest in rye as an economically important species is limited to a few countries, mainly in Central and Eastern Europe. For this reason, the financial outlays for rye research globally are small. The whole world was interested in learning about the human DNA sequence, and the rye DNA sequence interested only several countries where it is grown – says Dr Beata Myśków.
The genome description has been published in a journal Nature Genetics. The discovery could help improve rye-related crops such as wheat, triticale and barley.
