Fereydoun Hormozdiari (@fhormozd.bsky.social)

Pan-genome bridges wheat structural variations with habitat and breeding | Nature Wheat is the second largest food crop with a very good breeding system and pedigree record in China. Investigating the genomic footprints of wheat cultivars will unveil potential avenues for future breeding efforts1,2. Here we report chromosome-level genome assemblies of 17 wheat cultivars that chronicle the breeding history of China. Comparative genomic analysis uncovered a wealth of structural rearrangements, identifying 249,976 structural variations with 49.03% (122,567) longer than 5 kb. Cultivars developed in 1980s displayed significant accumulations of structural variations, a pattern linked to the extensive incorporation of European and American varieties into breeding programmes of that era. We further proved that structural variations in the centromere-proximal regions are associated with a reduction of crossover events. We showed that common wheat evolved from spring to winter types via mutations and duplications of the VRN-A1 gene as an adaptation strategy to a changing https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-024-08277-0