Back

Genome Sequencing of Rice Landraces from the Yuanyang Terraces Uncovers Ancient and Diverse Lineages of Indica Rice

Huang, H.; Duan, S.; Li, X.; Ma, L.; He, X.; Zhu, Y.; Li, C.; Yang, D.; morel, j.-b.; Gladieux, P.

2025-09-12 evolutionary biology
10.1101/2025.09.09.675106 bioRxiv
Show abstract

High-yielding elite rice cultivars exhibit limited genetic variability, raising concerns about our capacity to sustain productivity in the face of changing biotic and abiotic threats. Meeting the challenges that lie ahead largely depends on our ability to make use of novel sources of genetic variation and re-engineer agrosystems. Here, we report on the evolutionary history and population genetic structure of 353 accessions representing 91 landraces from Chinas centuries-old Yuanyang terraces of rice paddies (YYT). We found that the indica YYT landrace population is genetically structured and exhibits high standard variation. Analysis of natural selection reveals that innate immunity genes have a marked difference in coevolutionary dynamics between modern and traditional rice, characterized by a stronger influence of directional selection, which reduces diversity, in modern varieties. Our study highlights the importance of preserving landraces and the need for targeted efforts to integrate the standing variation in landraces into new varieties.

Matching journals

The top 3 journals account for 50% of the predicted probability mass.

50% of probability mass above

"Similar papers" are the closest papers from that journal in the model's embedding space. They show what the match is built on, but the ranking comes mostly from a classifier over the whole training set, not from these examples alone.