Pan-genome brings opportunities to revitalize the ancient crop foxtail millet
Yinpei Liang, Yuanhuai Han
Abstract
The annual grass, foxtail millet (Setaria italica), was first domesticated ∼11,000 years ago, making it one of the most ancient crops in the world, and it was the mainstay underpinning the development of Asian farming civilization. The looming food shortage crisis aggravated by climate change threatens to make current agriculture unsustainable. As a C4 photosynthetic plant, foxtail millet has attracted increasing attention from the scientific and industrial farming communities because of its drought tolerance, good adaptability and nutritional properties. Foxtail millet and green foxtail (Setaria viridis) have been developed into ideal model systems for C4 crops due to their compact diploid genomes, rich genetic diversity, self-pollination, high-throughput transformation, short life cycles and ease of laboratory culture.