Scientists from an organization in south China's Shenzhen City published a draft genome map of Tibetan highland barley in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS).
The recent breakthrough, according to the BGI Tech Solutions in Shenzhen, will aid scientists and farmers in the cultivation of better strains of Tibet's staple food and increase production and quality.
A genome is the full DNA sequence of an organism. It is a series of complex molecules that guides the formation and function of all living organisms.
The size of an organism's genome can be measures by the number of bases it has. Base pairs are the building blocks of DNA or deoxyribonucleic acid.
For example, a wheat genome has an approximate 17 billion base pairs, while a soybean genome has about 1.1 billion base pairs.
The research constructed 3.89 billion of the estimated figure of 4.5 billion base pairs of the chemicals that constitute DNA in the barley genome, and that it also included 39,197 protein coding genes, according to BGI.
Zhao Shancen of BGI Tech Solutions stated that the research work could help understand adaptations to extreme environmental conditions and enhance barley production.
The highland barley, popularly called in Tibet as "ne," has been growing in the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau for almost 4,000 years.
The production of "ne" comprises about 70 percent of all cereal crops in southwest China's Tibet Autonomous Region, which is the world's leading barley production base as well as the center for barley diversity research.