Advances on Gene Resource Mining in Sheepgrass (Leymus chinensis)

Sheepgrass (Leymus chinensis (Trin.) Tzvel.) has different environmental adaptation and spans different soil and climatic conditions and supports soil and water protection, ecological construction, and animal husbandry, especially in the Northern China. It has excellent genetic resources and is worth digging. The development and application of next-generation sequencing technology (NGS) have been greatly accelerated gene resource mining in sheepgrass. The establishment of omics database of diverse stress treatments of freezing, saline-alkaline, drought, wounding, defoliation, and animal saliva deposition and organs at specific developmental stages has promoted the global overview of particular biological properties and provides resources to discover novel genes in sheepgrass. A number of stress-related genes has been cloned and experimentally validated, and the elite genes in sheepgrass may provide a choice for forage and crops improvement. In the future, the availability of sheepgrass genome and the development of new technologies, such as CRISPR/Cas9 genome editing, phenotyping and genotyping, genome-wide association study (GWAS), etc., will accelerate sheepgrass gene resource mining and utilities.