Advancing Grass Crop Genomics With The New Model Plant Brachypodium distachyon.

The majority of domesticated grasses are cool season species that belong to one of four tribes, the Triticeae, Aveneae, Poeae, and Bromeae. Despite the many available genomic resources for rice, it is not a highly practical model system for cool season grasses because of its distant evolutionary relationship to them. Further, rice is not a particularly amenable surrogate species for undertaking high throughput functional genomics relevant to either cool season grasses or species such as switchgrass that are being explored as sources of feedstock for production of biofuels. Recently, the wild grass Brachypodium distachyon (Brachypodium) has been proposed as a model for both structural and functional genomics in grasses due to many biological features that are similar to those of Arabidopsis, and its close evolutionary relationship with cool season grass crops. The potential power of a model grass for structural and functional studies in grass crops has led many laboratories around the world to begin employing Brachypodium for diverse research projects. In turn, within a short period of time a plethora of genetic, genomic, and bioinformatic resources have been developed to facilitate research with Brachypodium. The many desirable biological attributes of Brachypodium, coupled with the generation of requisite genomics research resources, make Brachypodium a highly attractive and powerful new model system for accelerating grass crop improvement.  This presentation will present an overview of the status of genomics research in Brachypodium, including progress toward sequencing the nuclear genome of this model grass.