Nearly a century ago, an experiment was initiated that could secure the future of beer and whiskey production in the face of climate change. This experiment has allowed researchers to identify the genes responsible for the remarkable adaptability of barley, a key ingredient in both beverages. As climate change accelerates, these findings could be crucial for the survival of barley crops worldwide.

Barley has been cultivated for over 12,000 years in regions as diverse as Asia, Egypt, Norway, and the Andes mountains of South America. It is one of the world’s most important cereal crops. As it spread across different climates, random changes in its DNA allowed barley to survive in each new location. Understanding these genetic changes is key to predicting which barley varieties will thrive in regions increasingly affected by higher temperatures, longer droughts, and more dramatic storms.

Dan Koenig, a geneticist at UC Riverside, explains that plant breeders have long understood the need to develop crops well-adapted to their local environment. A century ago, they started an experiment in Davis, California, with barley varieties from around the world to identify locally adapted varieties, he says. However, early scientists lacked the tools to identify which genes were responsible for barley’s success and high yield in a particular environment. Today, researchers can study millions of genetic changes in a single experiment.

In a new study published in the journal Science, Koenig and his team describe dozens of genes that contribute to barley’s adaptability. Some of these genes help synchronize barley’s reproductive processes with the optimal parts of the growing season. Koenig explains that if barley flowers too early or too late, it won’t produce seeds. For crops to yield the maximum number of seeds, they must flower within a very narrow period, he says.

Barley growing in a UC Davis field, part of a century-old biological experiment.
Barley growing in a UC Davis field, part of a century-old biological experiment. Credit: Dan Koenig / UCR

In California, barley must finish flowering before the long dry season begins, or there won’t be enough water for seed production. However, if the plants flower too early, they could be exposed to frost. The researchers identified several genes that either promote early flowering or delay late flowering, allowing the plant to flower at the right time.

Identifying these genes wasn’t easy. One of the challenges in understanding genetic adaptations is that observing them can take decades since only one generation of barley can be grown each year, says Koenig. Fortunately, Koenig and his colleagues have access to the Barley Composite Cross II experiment, founded in Davis, California, in 1929. This is one of the oldest biological experiments in the world, started to find new barley varieties for the California market.

Over 58 growing seasons, the field evolved from 15,000 genetically distinct individual plants to a single line of plants that dominated 60% of the population. Remarkably, this process occurred without any human selection. We were surprised by how many changes occurred in such a short evolutionary time, says Koenig. Natural selection completely reshaped genetic diversity across the genome within just a human lifetime.

The research team plans further studies to examine long-term experimental data from different climates to understand how flowering times might be adjusted differently. They also want to explore an interesting observation: as the plants adapted to Northern California, their yield nearly doubled, but this increase is still less than what breeders achieve with manual selection.

Because barley is genetically similar to wheat, rice, and corn, understanding how it survives in diverse environments could help these other grains adapt to climate extremes. With modern technology like genome engineering and CRISPR, researchers could try to design other crops to flower at specific, more advantageous times.

The adaptability of barley has served as a cornerstone for the development of civilization, says Koenig. Understanding it is important not only for continuing to make alcoholic beverages but also for our ability to develop future crops and improve their adaptability as the world changes.

SOURCES

University of California, Riverside

Jacob B. Landis et al., Natural selection drives emergent genetic homogeneity in a century-scale experiment with barley. Science385, eadl0038(2024). DOI:10.1126/science.adl0038

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