Vanilla, known as the "queen of spices", has been widely used in food, cosmetics and other industries for its unique but unsynthetic fragrance. Now the mystery of this unique fragrance is about to be solved. A research team from fujian agricultural and forestry university and the national orchid plant germplasm conservation center has completed the sequencing of the shenzhen vanilla genome, according to a statement released by the university Thursday. This means that vanilla has become the first orchid vine to be sequenced in the world, and will obtain the world's first important spice plant genome map, which lays China's international leading position in the field of vanilla genome research.
According to the introduction, orchidaceae plants account for 10% of all plant species in the world, and members of the world endangered species, honeysuckle, are orchidaceae. Previously, relevant foreign research teams also sequenced and analyzed the genome of vanilla. However, due to the problems of large genome, high heterozygosity and multiple repeat sequences, there are no successful cases in the world at present.
Fujian agriculture and forestry university President, the strait of orchids si-ren LAN conservation research center's chief scientist, said the project is completed, to reveal the origin of orchid and system evolution research important basis, for all orchid vanilla and conservation research and industrialization to provide new breakthrough, to strengthening the protection of orchid, orchid variety innovation, and improve the research level in the field of biology, biological diversity is of great significance.
In recent years, more than 500 original species of orchids have been collected and preserved by fujian agriculture and forestry university, and a germplasm gene bank for the biodiversity of living plants of the major endangered species of orchids in southeast China has been established.