Understanding the functional contribution of non-coding regions is a major challenge in plant genomics. Many non-coding regions have regulatory roles as promoters, enhancers or conserved non-coding sequences, or are altered by structural variation. Identifying these functionally constrained regions helps plant breeders prioritize GWAS hits and can improve the accuracy of genomic selection models by adding biological priors.
During my PhD, I identified intron retention events that are conserved across grass species. For a subset of these events, the retained intron sequences are themselves conserved, suggesting that they are under functional constraint (Genetics, 2017, cover article). As a postdoc, I explored whole-genome alignments across more than 60 plant species in Phytozome to identify conserved regions genome-wide, with the aim of connecting functional constraint to plant breeding, climate adaptation, genome function and natural selection.