Avena Genetic and Genomics Resources for Allele Mining in Oats

Oats are small grain cereals with a low carbon footprint, great significance in circular agriculture and in sustainable crop production, characterized by peculiar content in primary and secondary metabolites, which fits into a healthy food diet. Varietal innovation is a training factor to promote the cultivation of this cereal and allele mining is one of the pieces of the puzzle that supports breeding new varieties improved for agronomic and qualitative traits. This approach can be effectively used for discovery of superior alleles through “mining” the gene of interest from diverse genetic resources, ranging from germplasm collections to mutant ones, obtained, e.g., via Eco-TILLING and TILLING strategies. Wide collections of oat genetic resources are available worldwide in several private and public collections and Gene Banks, as the result of a decades-long effort by botanists and geneticists. Consequently, oat germplasm is included in the top 10 genetic resource collections held by Gene Banks. Core collections, useful to discover new alleles, have been developed in the frame of several projects and consortia. Novel genetic variation has been obtained with a TILLING approach and the derived populations are now available to study specific traits. Finally, high-quality genome references of oats at different ploidy level have been recently developed and are now available to the research community, as the primary starting point for an efficient allele mining activity.