An international team of researchers from Bielefeld University, Germany, the Centre for Genomic Regulation (CRG) in Barcelona, Spain, and a number of other German institutes have this week sequenced the sugar beet gene for the first time.

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The researchers, working with industry partners, managed to sequence and analyse 'the sweet genes of beetroot.' The results of their work were published in Nature, and shed new light on how the genome has been shaped by artificial selection.

White refined sugar from beet is used in a vast array of foodstuffs. The beet belongs to the same family as spinach and chard, and, according to the UN FAO accounts for 30 percent of the world's annual sugar production.

The sugar beet is the first of the Caryophyllales group of flowering plants, which comprises 11,500 species, including spinach and quinoa, to have had its genome sequenced. The diverse plant group also contains carnivorous plants and desert plants.

Sugar beet contains 27,421 protein-coding genes, the researchers said, more than are encoded within the human genome. However, according to Bernd Weisshaar, a principle investigator from Bielefeld University, "Sugar beet has a lower number of genes encoding transcription factors than any flowering plant with already known genome".

The researchers speculated that further analysis could lead to the discovery of new genes or networks. Many sequencing projects nowadays target the analysis of novel genomes, and also look at genetic variation within the species of interest. Another investigator, Heinz Himmelbauer, said the beet study went further and assembled genomes from five sugar beet lines in total, in order to provide future researchers with a better picture of variations between different sugar beet.

The researchers said that, thanks to their discovery, sugar beet producers could eventually improve the crop, as well as informing work on other species; "Sugar beet will be an important cornerstone of future genomic studies involving plants, due to its taxonomic position*," they said.

* its classification by scientists according to its properties and natural relationships, e.g. into family, genus, species – in this case, the first plant of the Caryophyllales order to have its genome mapped