Exploring structural variants in plant pangenomics: innovations and applications
Structural variants (SVs), which include large insertions, deletions, duplications, inversions, and translocations, have emerged as pivotal drivers of genomic diversity in plants. Unlike single-nucleotide changes, SVs can drastically alter gene content and genome architecture, thereby influencing phenotypic traits and adaptive potential (Hu et al., 2024a). The advent of plant pangenomes, which capture the full spectrum of genetic variation across multiple accessions of a species, has revolutionized our understanding of how SVs contribute to evolution and crop improvement (Hu et al., 2024b). By moving beyond a single reference genome, pangenomic analyses reveal missing genes and alleles, uncovering SV-linked traits that traditional single-reference genome-based approaches often overlook (Tong et al., 2025; Wang et al., 2023). This Research Topic focuses on these advances, highlighting studies that leverage pangenome frameworks to elucidate the roles of SVs in genetic diversity, environmental adaptation, and agronomic traits. We synthesize the findings of the contributions in this Research Topic and place them within the broader context of recent large-scale comparative studies in crops such as rice and barley, which also demonstrate the transformative impact of SV analysis on plant genomics.
Details
Title
Editorial: Exploring structural variants in plant pangenomics: innovations and applications
Authors/Creators
Jinglong Wang - Tibet Academy of Agricultural and Animal Husbandry Sciences
Qilong Zhou - Tibet Academy of Agricultural and Animal Husbandry Sciences
Yunfei Liu - Tibet Academy of Agricultural and Animal Husbandry Sciences