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Wild crop relatives are valuable genetic resources for improving stress adaptation in cultivated species. Their usage is expanding with the availability of reference genomes. We assembled a chromosome-scale, annotated reference genome of Hordeum erectifolium, a wild relative of barley, adapted to drought and saline soils, making it an excellent species for stress-adaptation research. Comparative morphological and genomic analyses, conducted with H. erectifolium and cultivated barley, revealed morphological adaptation and copy number expansions of desiccation-responsive gene families in H. erectifolium. Extensive physiological and transcriptomic analyses performed under water-limiting conditions pointed to contrasting drought-adaptation strategies between barley and its wild relative.
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