The Rise of Brachypodium as a Model System

Abstract

Grasses have played a central role in the formation of human civilization. Indeed, the inception of agriculture and the production of grains that could be easily stored and traded is one of the major factors that led to the creation of cities and the specialization of labor. Today, grasses provide the bulk of calories consumed by humans either directly through the consumption of grain or indirectly through grain and grass fed animals. Furthermore, due to their high productivity, grasses are increasingly utilized as a source of renewable biomass for the sustainable production of bioenergy and liquid biofuels. Grasses also play a fundamental role in many terrestrial ecosystems that benefit humans in numerous ways. Given the importance of grasses to humanity, there is considerable value in understanding their biology in great detail. Model biological systems greatly facilitate scientific research and many of the rapid advances in molecular biology and genetics would have been difficult to achieve without them. The model plant Arabidopsis thaliana has been used to make tremendous gains in our understanding of plant biology. However, as a eudicot, A. thaliana is unsuitable to study the unique aspects of grass biology. Several crop grasses (e.g. maize and rice) have been used as model systems and while each has certain strengths, they have some disadvantages when compared to a model like A. thaliana. Brachypodium distachyon has emerged to fill the need for a truly tractable model grass that is compatible with modern high-throughput molecular-genetic experiments. An overview of the development and widespread adoption of B. distachyon as a model grass is presented.