BRIDGE Project: Biodiversity Informatics for Harnessing Barley Genetic Diversity Hosted at the Genebank of IPK Gatersleben

Genomics and biodiversity informatics are rising as fundamental tools to harness genetic resources harbored in germplasm collections, which represent essential albeit mostly untapped reservoirs of genetic diversity for crop research and improvement. The BRIDGE project aims to molecularly characterize more than 20,000 accessions of wild (Hordeum vulgare L. subsp. spontaneum (K. Koch) Thell.) and domesticated (Hordeum vulgare L. subsp. vulgare) barley hosted at the German ex situ genebank at IPK Gatersleben, by means of a genotyping-by-sequencing (GBS) approach. GBS data will be analyzed in context of the barley genomic framework to study population structure and genetic diversity patterns and also to mine allelic variation at breeding-relevant traits. A novel warehouse infrastructure will provide a systematic valorization to the upcoming genomics data and a link to the passport and phenotypic data accumulated by the IPK genebank conservation management. Here, we describe our bioinformatics pipeline for read mapping, variant detection and genotyping. First results of the GBS analysis conducted on more than 3,000 barley accessions will be presented.